SS Officers, Nazi Guards and Female staff members 'enjoying their day' at the Auschwitz Death Camp.

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 citing Wassman's "KL," a brutal and utterly detailed qccount of the Holocaust.

These famous photos are of KL staff enjoying a vacation they received as part of a bonus for being "good employees" at the camp they were stationed in. The SS prized brutality above all else inside the camps, and while it is difficult to k ow what exactly earned these specific guards this retreat, it was almost certainly some public display of inhumanity against a KL inmate.

These images are among the most important of KL history, as they show us that the guards were not threatened or coerced into brutality. Instead, they reveled in it. They enjoyed, and we're rewarded for, the cruelty they visited on others.

The initial killing in the Holocaust was just soldiers machine gunning down rows of people. The “problem” with that was that many soldiers were committing suicide. So the Nazi higher ups designed the gas chambers because it was more sanitized. They also had to manipulate people working at the camps in order to get them do do heir jobs.

This does not excuse this at all. We're all accountable for our actions. But these pictures don't capture the whole story. Don't forget that Stanley Milgram's research showed that many—but not all—regular people can be manipulated into committing atrocities.

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The Nazi Party having a Nazi Party

[JW Insider]

On 3/27/2022 at 10:57 PM, Mic Drop said:

Don't forget that Stanley Milgram's research showed that many—but not all—regular people can be manipulated into committing atrocities.

Good point. These points have crossed my mind as I have been to places recently that asked me if I wanted to add a donation to the Nazi-backed regime in Ukraine. Of course, they don't put it exactly like that, and I don't think of recent Russian war crimes as any less troublesome. 

By coincidence, just yesterday, I read a few stories in a book I was about to toss out, called "The Complete Stories of Erskine Caldwell." I noticed that he often touched on the topic of race relations between Whites and Blacks in Georgia, while writing during the peak years of Nazi atrocities. It might seem unlrelated, but there were a couple sentences in the following linked story "Saturday Afternoon" that reminded me of Stanley Milgram's research. [Caution: It's about a lynching!]

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/caldwell.html

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