When Ignorance and Hatred Run Amok

After a run of frivolity in the forum, it's time for something more serious. . .

This is an excerpt from an article in the Los Angeles Times. It's
a reminder to all of us what we are capable of as humans.

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In March 1943 he left for a year of training in Georgia, then boarded a
British ship for Europe. He saw comrades fall to German attacks as they
pushed through France and Germany. But nothing had prepared him for
Ebensee, the brutal sub-camp of Mauthausen.

"We had never
even heard about the concentration camps until a few weeks before the
war ended, when I read in the Stars and Stripes [the U.S. military
newspaper] about one of the camps, maybe Bergen-Belsen, and how the
American [soldiers] were running into this."

His
reconnaissance unit was patrolling "a beautiful little town" in the
Austrian Alps, with roads flanked by forests and lakes. Another unit
had spotted the camp, two miles from town up a mountain road. Persinger
was dispatched to check it out and report back.

He rolled his
tank up to the compound's barbed-wire gates. Inside, thousands of
people ? dressed in rags, looking more dead than alive ? were "milling
around like bees," he said.

"We stopped and peered down in
amazement. We couldn't believe what we were seeing." There were "dead
bodies scattered here and there, all over the ground." Thousands of
inmates surged forward, as thin as skeletons, shivering in filthy,
striped pajamas. "Some just wore the tops, some the pants, some had no
clothes at all, standing ankle-deep in mud," he recalled.

The
German camp commanders had deserted and left elderly Austrian civilians
in charge. Persinger emerged from his tank, snatched a rifle from one
of the guards, broke it over the turret of his tank and hung it over a
lamppost beside the gate.

"It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of
thing," he said. "It brought on such a roar; it was pandemonium?. The
prisoners surrounded us, dirty, open sores all over them, loaded with
lice.

"I'd seen death before, but nothing like that. I remember
thinking: If everybody could see this, there wouldn't be nothing like
wars anymore. To treat human beings like that ? I couldn't have
imagined."

In the crematorium ? which had operated around the
clock, turning hundreds of corpses each day to ash ? they found bodies
stacked along a wall, 400 or more, waiting to be burned.

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"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return." -- Toulouse-Lautre, Moulin Rouge

Reminds me of the Band of Brothers episode - Why we fight

Shocking, but there is even worse, Stalin already managed to kill more in the goelags, but Mao even went above that.

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RUST Gamedesign
pepper design

The strength of the turbulence is directly proportional to the temperature of your coffee.

STOP POSTING THIS s**t.

(whispers) Someone has way to much time on their hands.

Dammit, can't you post some good rice recipes or something equally important for a change. :wink:

I am about to go get some new tires so I'll have to wait to read this fully.

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There is no history until something happens, then there is.

I can't see why you found this particular story so impressive when
there are countless others more horrible than any sane person could
imagine. I could start with Mengele's children and Dachau...

Pepper, I'm not aware of the number of people Stalin and Mao killed... what are the numbers on that?

And I agree, there are some really shocking and terrible stories
involving the holocaust. I went to DC to visit the Holocaust
Museum and I suggest you visit it if you're ever in the DC area.
It's not an easily forgettable experience.

the holocaust is made up by Jews because they are trying to take over the world.

HAHAHA that's the most retarded thing i've ever heard, but i know some ppl who think that.

It was a very horrible time for everyone. I don't know how I'm really supposed to respond to your post... over half of me is sorry we killed the Jews, and about 16th of me is angry that we were persecuted...

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I tried sniffing coke, but the ice cubes kept getting stuck in my nose.
http://www.dimebowl.com

I was at Terenzin, the concentration camp North of Prague, a few years
ago. I have witnessed evidence of atrocity first-hand.



But this story still impressed me, even on an ordinary morning like this.

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"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return." -- Toulouse-Lautre, Moulin Rouge

Most of those sorts of things went on in austria, they would go through
as many jews as they could until they achieved things such as
counterfeit british notes to break our economy (which they later became
so greedy about - they kept themselves)

Afaik lots of the hitler youth places were in austrian alps etc also,
and they were encouraged to go to the jewish concentration camps to
belittle them & order them for the experience (these are kids
remember, some of them have never lost memories of jews being killed in
front of them)

The sad truth is, most of these kids were so indoctrinated with hitlers
views they took them seriously enough to not give in where adults did,
as germany fell, many of the elder germans gave themselves up. But due
to the false beliefs of these little children they actually hated the
adults for giving in, it was told you were not allowed to do such
things.

The russians of course had to kill children as young as like 8 because
of it. The moral of the story being, our education system isn't -that- bad
:razz:

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My Pit

I do not have excat figures but i know in the time that stalin industrialized Russia 20 million russians found the death, not to little i'd say. Mao(Chinese revolution) even went higher, dozen million above it. Again, i have no excate figures yet.

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RUST Gamedesign
pepper design

The strength of the turbulence is directly proportional to the temperature of your coffee.

Yeah, I think what makes the Holocaust so terrible was the fact that it was a systematic, organized, mass-genocide.