UPDATED/The 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz death camp
One million and one hundred thousand men, women and children were murdered there over four years.
UPDATED: This is the British documentary made after the war, with original film footage taken by cameramen who entered the death camps with British and American forces when Germany was defeated. My maternal grandmother’s brother was one of those American soldiers. He was given a passage to Malta to visit his sister before returning home to New York. Still in a state of shock at what he had seen, he talked about it constantly and nobody believed him, thinking that his mind had been affected or that he was exaggerating in that American way. It was beyond belief, beyond comprehension. You have to wonder who all those women were, the death camp guards, bustling and strutting in that matter-of-fact manner, and whether they went back to their normal lives and families, doing the grocery shopping and the cooking and cleaning as though nothing had happened, and keeping it secret all the while. I don’t think they were all arrested; most would have slipped away.
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Bone chilling, thank you for sharing.
I’ve always maintained that Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ is a film everyone in the West should see at least once in their lives, all 9 and a half hours of it.
The BBC just had it broadcast. Hadn’t heard of it before but was hooked on it over the past two days. Spine chilling, I think nothing comes close to showing how this atrocity could so easily happen and how easily it can happen again
The real criminal masterminds got away free with their crimes.
http://continuingcounterreformation.blogspot.ca/2009/07/wlodimir-ledochowski-kulturkampf_17.html
I hope you remembered your tinfoil hat.
A day or two ago I heard on BBC World Service that a British team had made a film about the place, on the spot, I believe. It was never shown but has now been re-made – or something like that. Wish I’d listened better.
What you are referring to is, ” Night Will Fall.” Over here, in America, it is airing tonight on HBO.
When the Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War Two, they shot extensive footage of all the horrific scenes they encountered.
The British and American governments were persuaded by British film producer, Sidney Berstein, along with Alfred Hitchcook, to turn over the footage so that it could be made into a documentary.
For a variety of practical and political reasons, the documentary was not completed until now, under the directorship of Andre Singer. Helena Bonham Carter is the narrator.
Allied soldiers took several hours of film to document the horror and it was all put together and edited under the direction of one Alfred Hitchcock – his one and only documentary, apparently. There was a doc about the doc on TV here, but I only saw part of it, as it was late night stuff.
It is called “Night Will Fall”. You should find it on BBC iPlayer and there is some unbelievable previously unseen footage.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u5Q6_xMBREY
Mr Ripard, This is the first part of that documentary. It is directed by Alfred Hitchcock and shows the liberation of not just Auschwitz but Dachau, Buchwald, Bergen Belsen and other camps.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W88gA7O_tOM
And this is the entire documentary.
http://pagesix.com/2015/01/17/hitchcocks-lost-wwii-documentary-to-air-on-hbo/
The making of the film is a story itself. The footage is the collective of British, American and Russian army document crews.
Material was so extensive that editing took months, Hitchcock asked to help give the product its slant, after he had reviewed all the material in Paris.
Given the delays, the Americans decided to do their own, with Billy Wilder in charge. That one however turned out rather triumphalistic, the script an accusation directed at the German people.
This one as a consequence, was filed away for political reasons. After Wilder’s film, it was deemed counterproductive to issue another one to a European audience including that half of Germany not occupied by Russia.
The decision would tarnish Churchill and lead to the holocaust denial.
What it did serve, were the Nuremberg trials.
Thank you all for filling in the blanks – ‘preciate it.
In the meantime some survivors have to line up in Haifa’s Survivor’s Street for social fund food.
How sad is this world.
JE SUIS JUIF
I will never forget the smell of death still prevalent in the concentration camp of Dacau, thirty years after its liberation. A horrific experience but an extremely good eye-opener.
A visit to a concentration camp should be compulsory to all as it would bring us all face to face to the horrors that homo sapience is capable of concocting.
The egocentric society of today is a reflection of the erosion over the yeas of the cry our fathers shouted at the end of WWII, “Never again!”.
“Mitna ghal xejn, mitna ghall-barrani”
In the early sixties, my family bought a Phillips black and white TV set. One of the first things I remember watching, apart from Carosello, Pow-wow the Indian Boy and La Nonna Del Corsaro Nero were very grainy film clips of authentic footage of what the liberators found in the concentration camps: the mountains of hair and gold teeth, the huge piles of shoes and spectacles, the mass graves, the lamp shades made from human skin, and the living skeletons of the survivors.
Later on came the recordings of the trial of that denizen of hell, Adolf Eichmann, who went to the gallows unrepentant.
Those memories will stay with me till the end of my days. I don’t need Hollywood films as a reminder.
How anyone can ever claim that the Holocaust was a hoax and the original footage doctored is beyond me.
I recall those clips. If I am not mistaken, during the late 1960s and early 70s there was a documentary on the Holocaust. I remember the exact same authentic footage.
What remains impressed in my mind was the narrator claiming that the mountains of hair, gold teeth, shoes and clothing were those worn by women and children.
The Holocaust, the stories passed on by my grandparents, and the centuries of European warmongering are basis upon which I firmly believe that the European Union is a good idea.
We must be very careful not to repeat history by helping those refugees who cross our shores.
Also see: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/25/world/auschwitz-dancing-mengele/. The Holocaust survivor, Dr Edith Eger, concludes – “Four generations [of her family], the best revenge to Hitler”.
In the early sixties some relatives of mine emigrated to Canada. I remember one of them saying how the neighbourhood they first lived in was populated with Polish Jews all survivors of the concentration camps with grisly stories to tell.
I also remember the son of a neighbour of ours at our summer residence who was married to a Jewish woman who had been a victim of the medical experiments that were carried out in one of the camps and a few decades ago when I was abroad, I encountered an old Jewish couple, both concentration camp survivors who showed me the numbers that were tattooed on their arms.
The Eichmann story is currently available on BBC iPlayer, where it is described as:
‘The behind-the-scenes true life story of a groundbreaking producer, Milton Fruchtman, and blacklisted TV director Leo Hurwitz who, overcoming enormous obstacles, set out to capture the testimony of one of the war’s most notorious Nazis, Adolf Eichmann. He is accused of executing the ‘final solution’ and organising the murder of 6 million Jews. This is the extraordinary story of how the trial came to be televised and the team that made it happen.’
The BBC is also broadcasting Shoah (a must see, even if utterly depressing) also available on iPlayer.
The sight of that bastard on the original grainy film clips of so long ago , still gives me the shivers. He went unrepentant to the gallows! Hope he is burning in hell , if there is a hell .They say that everyone has some good within him/her no matter how bad he/she may be.
I honestly believe that Eichmann and Hitler are exceptions.
And yet there are many who deny the Holocaust ever took place.
”Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Edith Eva Eger, Holocaust survivor’s greatest pride and joy are clearly her three great-grandchildren.”
”That’s the best revenge to Hitler I can think of,” says the dancer, pointing at one of several portraits of her smiling great-grandchildren in her office.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/25/world/auschwitz-dancing-mengele/
People will never learn. Thousands are still being killed in war zones.
For every person alive today on this island there were 3 that died in Auschwitz……. mind boggling.
Even when I put it that way I find it hard to visualise the sheer magnitude.
I suggest you make that 24 people for every Maltese today on this island. Daphne’s original number is off by a factor of 10. She left out a digit.
[Daphne – No, the number I give in the post is perfectly correct. It is the number of those killed at Auschwitz only. The post is about Auschwitz.]
11 million people were killed during the Holocaust (1.1 million children). 6 million of those victims were Jewish. Other groups targeted by the Nazis were Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, disabled people, and Gypsies.
And some 55 million in all in WWII… or 122 people for every man, woman and child in Malta today. All this happened just 70 years ago.
It really is important that we never forget. My fear is that civilisation is only skin deep.
Other victims of the Nazi concentration camps included political activists like Communists militating against Nazism, church people who stood up to Hitler, and others deemed to hail from a ‘lesser’ race, like Slavs.
And monarchists, and right-wing liberal journalists, and aristocrats, who were among the first victims of Nazism, even before 1933.
Visiting the place makes you understand the extent of what it was. Yet I always question my faith when I think about it: why did God permit such a thing to happen? No one has provided an answer as yet
The question should be surely the rest of the world knew what was happening in the camps and did nothing to stop it or rather left it for too late.
If we are still remembering 70 years on and rightly so, why are we still ignoring what nearly similar atrocities like genocide are still evident in África, Iraq and to the situation in Gaza.
There will be no peace in the world if there is no peace in the Middle East.
Truly the world never learns. If we’re not careful we could have another Auschwitz filled with Muslims or African migrants or maybe even Jews again.
When can’t we see another human being precisely that? Another human being.
It was easy for the Nazi soldiers to kill so many people in their camps because they first stripped their prisoners of their humanity and reduced them to just animals fighting for their survival.
When stripping an African migrant of his/ her own humanity and saying that they’re all terrorists and opportunists, it’s so much easier to say that it serves them right after they get beaten and killed for trying to escape horrible refugee camps.
I agree fully. We need to learn the lessons of the past.
On the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Golden Dawn became the third biggest political party in Greece.
Shame.
I just shudder to think what our fate would have been had Malta capitulated to the Axis forces of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany.
Would our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents have been deported to labour camps in Nazi-occupied mainland Europe? Would I have been born? Where would all of us Maltese be today, those of us who were actually born?
While my thoughts go to all those, especially Jews, who died or suffered inside the Nazi-created hells-on-earth, I also have to thank our predecessors who lived and died during Malta’s blitzkrieg, and the military forces who fought and gave up their limbs and lives (and in many cases, their mental health) so that we would be free.
It is such a pity that the suffering of our forefathers is not a major topic in our educational sphere. Instead we see and read stupid rewriting of history by mostly Maltese left wing commentators trying to denigrate Britain’s military presence in Malta, trying to convince others to believe that if Malta had no military presence (neutral) then Hitler or Mussolini would have left Malta alone and the islands would have remained untouched by the war.
If Malta had been neutral, first we would have been reduced to slaves by the Nazis then Malta would have been bombarded into extinction by the Allied Forces who eventually and thankfully came out victorious over the Nazi beast.
There were two Maltese concentration camps in Italy of Maltese that lived in Tripoli and Italy before the war. I think about three or four died shot whilst trying to escape after ’43 by Germans.
Some naive Anglophobes try to give the impression that we only got a hard time because of the British base here.
The Ukrainians, who were more than ready to join the Germans in order to fight the hated Russians, were enslaved by the Nazis and put to work in hideous conditions.
And ironically made to work as guards at the camps further north like Treblinka. The survivors will tell you that the Ukrainians were even more heartless than the SS.
But that’s the old Steinbeck theme, isn’t it. Oppression will only breed more oppression.
70 years? Then it’s time to have that long-awaited national debate. Let’s have it all out: the Mifsud Bonnicis, Henry Frendo’s views, Borg Pisani, the Uganda internees, the Nationalist Party, and the British and Commonwealth nationals who died for Malta.
Insejt lil Tonio Borg.
Despite the promises of ‘never again’, concentration camps on a smaller scale were set up in Europe in the 1990s where Bosnian Muslims were tortured and starved. The World never learns. And unfortunately, there are some who would put Jews, Muslims or Africans in camps and eventually eliminate them. Very sad.
754 people a day.
For 4 years.
From just one of the many camps.
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2,912 a day from a list of other camps and prisons.
Many others.
The depravity of it all.
Fascism the umbrella excuse.
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@Natalie
“Stripping a person of humanity” really strikes home.
The degrees by which this “experiment” is applied politically doesn’t change the nature of the bent.
What is shocking beyond comprehension, too, is that people are prepared to forget and ignore the essential fundamentals of humanity.
When people are kept stupid, there is no association of concept, no analysis of the constitution of those fundamentals.
No concept of how little time has passed since it happened.
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After all that happened then, there is still no measure put in place to immediately safeguard individuals from this bent applied by those democratically elected to govern.
Just as one single extermination would already have been atrocious, so is each injustice carried out by such governments.
Each person has but one life, and when that is unreasonably destablised because one is seen as burdensome or threatening to a grip on power, then that life turns into a living hell lived 24 hours a day.
Even worse when it takes place under the guise of one label but occurring for another.
Even worse than that again, when some of your own turn you in for execution.
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When I had visited the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the second shock I experienced at the time after the complete awfullness of the persecutions and exterminations, was the disorientation and sense of dizziness purposely created by the uneven floor outside and inside the museum.
This is a design feature that was included to reflect the effect of persecution against Jews over the many centuries:
Fleeing to an elusive safety, forced by external factors to change direction, change home base, family members disappearing off the map, neighbours working to your detriment, marked, silenced, hunted, tripping, falling: death by progressive degree.
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How is Joseph Muscat’s application of “meritocracy” different, in principle?
And still today the Jews are under threat from those who wish to exterminate them.
It seems that in some people’s eyes being a Jew is a crime in itself.
I am not ashamed to say I have Jews amongst my recent ancestors.
Last year I visited Krakow. By the time I went on a tour to what is still called the Jewish Quarter, which included a visit to Schindler’s factory, I just couldn’t visit Auschwitz.
I was so terrified that I felt literally sick. The horror at what began even in the Jewish Quarter was too haunting.
Natalie, Nazi soldiers were specifically indoctrinated to regard Jews as nonhuman.
A few years back a Polish lady who was never in a concentration camp but spent the war years as a fugitive from the regime, came to Malta as part of her mission to relate her experiences to secondary school students.
She told me she was doing this because in a very short time there wouldn’t be any survivors from these concentration camps.
Alas, the ‘Mitna Ghall-Barrani’ mantra is believed by many. But what would have happened had the Germans invaded Malta?
There are many servicemen from different parts of the world who died to defend Malta. On your way to Valletta just visit the Air Force Monument and read the names of these servicemen and their country of origin. It’s an eye opener.
And another must is a visit to the Mtarfa Military cemetery. By reading the tombstones you would know the dates of the air raids and discover how many of those soldiers and airmen killed were just teenagers.
The Maltese suffered a lot and went through hell but things could have been much, much worse.
Also think of the sailors who died horrible deaths, so far away from home, drowned, burnt alive and or blasted away, defending and attempting to feed the Maltese, while keeping our forefathers out of the clutches of the Axis powers.
Does anyone seriously believe that Hitler would have treated the great majority of Maltese as aryans?
Those who attempt to rewrite history know no shame.
Precisely.
I watched such documentaries in Germany on ZDF and ARD.
I watch ZDF online, they have excellent documentaries. I am lucky to understand German.
One must not forget the thousands of disabled and mentally ill who were murdered by the Aktion T4 as part of the Eugenics programme. They were forcibly removed from their families under the pretence of them being institutionalized but these victims were eliminated. Germans too suffered under the Nazis.
When I visited Canberra’s war museum I cried. The stories about men and woman who sacrificed everything so that I and my children could live in freedom moved me so much that I could not withhold my feelings.
Anzac pilots had a major role in Malta’s survival along with many others, Maltese and British.
The sacrifices made by the British seamen in delivering life and hope to the Maltese when everything seemed lost should be one of the major historical episodes thought to Maltese school children.
If we ever lose the sense of commitment towards freedom and those values that go with it, including honest hard work, then we will be putting ourselves back in time at great risk of a repeat Nazi-style dictatorship.
Dictators are always prowling for pubic support by beguiling promises but mostly by creating an enemy. The Nazis created the Jew-hate machine, Stalin based his political successes on the hatred towards the rich, Milosevic towards the Bosnian Muslims and the Islamic extremists are indoctrinating their converts with hatred towards Jews, Christians and mainstream Muslims too, with increasing military successes in the middle East, Nigeria, and possibly in Pakistan and Indonesia too.
This new beast is getting more powerful by the day while the UN and the western democracies just look on.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance-Thomas Jefferson
Lest we forget. No we should NEVER forget.
That was a tragedy that happened. It has passed. I have been to Auschwitz and I could not eat after the experience until the following day.
What should be equally disconcerting is that there are people who still deny that this has happened, or that it is grossly exaggerated, and these individuals include some in politically authoritative posts.
I wonder who Hitler would target if he lived now.
It does not leave much to the imagination to guess.
Night And Fog is another good documentary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_and_Fog_(1955_film)).
An online copy is available here – http://vimeo.com/74528039
On a different note, it seems like naming your daughters ‘Soleil’ and ‘Etoile’ will no longer be allowed in France.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30993608
I have yet to find a satisfactory explanation for the Holocaust.
Hatred.
Not satisfactory. Just an explanation.
Hatred, definitely, but indifference and greed too played a crucial role.
Look at today’s slave labour in our midst – namely the Leisure Clothing scandal. The vast majority don’t bother to inform themselves properly (“Kieku vera jahqruhom ghalfejn ma jitilqux?!”) or simply don’t care (“Mhux kullimkien hekk jigri?!”) – whilst a minority are more concerned about how they might lose out (vide reports of Maltese ‘fellow workers’ heckling the foreigners testifying about the abuse they suffered at the factory)
On a related note, “is-sewwa jirbah zgur” is an empty slogan unless general indifference is overcome. A much more realist viewpoint is that attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
L-interess nazzjonali. As old as the hills. Hitler was anti-French and anti-Russian before he was an anti-Semite.
And then there was the conservation of the Aryan species.
There were no spring derogations at the time.
Laying aside your flippancy, “Aryan” or Nordic supremacism wasn’t a uniquely German view. Nor was it uniquely Nazi. It predated Nazism by at least seventy years. It even determined the policies of countries we like to regard as beacons of democracy, such as the US and Britain.
It’s hard to debate these issues in a blog comment, but if i had to sum up I’d say the least we can do is to acknowledge the complexities of the ideas and events that led Auschwitz (isn’t that always the case with history?). And also to look out for the warning signs in our leaders.
Yes, by god, j’accuse. Our leaders have a propensity for demagoguery, nationalism and suppression of dissent that is symptomatic of the early stages of dictatorship and of the rather advanced stages of totalitarianism. To which we may add myriad human rights abuses.
The best tool against totalitarianism is rejection of the national consensus.
Ciccio, Baxxter, read this on the same topic:
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/.premium-1.639148
Perhaps this is a better link:
http://htz.li/1wx
Rejection of the national consensus has been rebranded as negativity. The ruse works. It has effectively shackled the opposition.
Your point, Tabatha? Francis Galton was neither German nor a Nazi, and was born 67 years before Hitler. When Kipling spoke of the “White Man’s burden”, was he a Nazi? When Calvin Coolidge signed the 1924 Immigration Act, was he a Nazi?
But this is a sterile debate.
Here, have some of this:
https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfp1/t31.0-8/1909252_760192744065141_5225055194231774071_o.jpg
My point being early warning signs and culmination of these into a dangerous focused synchronicity.
When the early pointers are lightly dismissed as rightfully legitimate, acceptable in the interests of science etc.
Sometimes one has to create an enemy to attract followers. The Jews (and not only them) were easy to pick on.
I visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial garden in Jerusalem. I was impressed with the solemnity of the place but what impressed me most was the artistic and monumental beauty of the place and the total silence of the visitors on the way out.
In terms of numbers alone, there is a far bigger holocaust happening today – and it goes on.
The doctrine of non-humanity and its various offshoots is still applied successfully today, and for the same reasons.
Talking about the past is not that difficult – it is over and we can afford to be philosophical about it. After all, we were not around then, so we have no reason to look too closely at ourselves.
The present is another matter – it is less easy to acknowledge that we, too, may be quite wrong about evil we tacitly accept, if not openly support.
in 2002 I visited Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp in East Germany. It was kept in use until 1950, used for ‘enemies of the Communist regime’ after the Jews.
Till 1989 when the Berlin wall came down, East Germany had the death penalty for those who were against the regime.
Man can be so cruel.
And some idiots still believe that the Holocaust is just a massive conspiracy theory
And yet there are people who say that this never happened.
Some of the worst managed to elude justice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele
Better quality video link. Has a bit more footage in the beginning too.
http://youtu.be/vRmfBDmQUzU
If any proof is ever required (which it is not) that the Holocaust was the most obnoxious crime ever committed by the human race, it can be found within the psyche of German people.
Speak to them, as I have done many times, about it and the reaction you get says it all.
They have a guilt feeling and a sense of shame which is pervasive and everlasting.
As it should be.
We should watch and learn so that it never happens again. Yet, it’s still happening… North Korea comes to mind, but it’s not the only country. And still the UN is powerless to do something.
Primo Levi’s Se questo e’ un uomo, and La Tregua should be part of secondary schools syllabus.
It wasn’t just the nazis in WWII. This documentary is a real eye opener. And it seems that’s the way things are headed again.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_d03Tq1AdGI
In far greater numbers than auschwitz and the other death camps combined.
The following is unrelated to the above but I think it’s worth sharing.
Every year in the UK, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds holds the Big Garden Birdwatch in which it encourages members of the public to watch birds and other animals in gardens, parks and wherever else they can and report back to the Society.
The Society then compiles a list of all the creatures spotted and reports back to the public on the state of birds and other wildlife in Britain.
This year’s event took place on the 24th and 25th of January.
So many Maltese have never experienced the joys, or even seen, a bird-filled garden that I feel it’s important for them to watch videos like this one, posted just yesterday.
Also note that in spite of all the birds, you don’t hear any shooting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFTcSXP1lYM
The French have similar initiatives which are posted in the Mairies.
Perhaps I’m mistaken (and it’s certainly not the ideal place for me to be posting this) but there would be more interaction with the community in such Mairies.
Instead of going to a centralised “Mepa” all immediate applications for architectural changes etc are channelled via these community town halls and actioned there too.
Just to say that the volume and quality of traffic generated in such places is also worth looking at when other initiatives are put into action.
A community is built – thought upon thought – not imposed.
I agree with this approach, Matthew S.
Thank you for sharing. It is good that we remember. We must understand that every act of hatred, greed, selfishness, intolerance and unfairness, among other things, is a potential building block to a repeat of what happened.
On a different note: According to Times of Malta, “the gunmen then blew themselves”. Seriously?
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20150127/local/new-video-pictures-at-least-nine-killed-in-corinthia-tripoli-hotel-attack-assailants-killed-by-grenade-pm-to-make-statement-in-parliament.553624
A very strong good graphic documentary!
It really makes you ‘sick at heart’.
A MUST SEE FOR ALL.
Lest we forget.
Let all this suffering and cruelty be made known and shown to our descendants and all the human race for ever.
Thanks for sharing, Daphne!