Forgotten History: Violent Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust

[MechAg94]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alygC4r3rjw&t=1s

Forgotten Weapons put out a video the other day to talk about the Jewish resistance to the Nazi extermination efforts during WWII.  Both the few examples of resistance and the lack of resistance in many cases.  I recommend watching it.  It is just him reading through a paper he wrote some years ago on the subject.  It isn't that long and doesn't go into a great amount of detail.  It shows what can happen when a population is disarmed and led into a false sense of security.

For me, this was a very big reminder of why it is critical that we maintain our Second Amendment rights along with the right of self defense.  We should maintain an understanding that violence can be a tool for our defense and for stopping evil.  Violence is not automatically bad and we are ultimately responsible for our own safety and security. 

[French G.]

Read the book Ordinary Men. Excellent, rereading it now.

[MechAg94]

Looks interesting.  A lot of people don't believe it could happen.

Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of  RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.

While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition. 

Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today. 

[French G.]

They openly kept war diaries with action summaries that listed how many shot and almost always noted no resistance.

[tokugawa]

 Yes. Read it.  "Ordinary Men" is one of the most chilling things I have ever read.

 Of particular interest was the ordinary guy who blew off a little girls head with a K98 at five feet,, puked uncontrollably, AND WENT BACK TO KILLING THE MOTHER. And father. And the rest of the line up.  After a while, it became just a job. These guys started out as train guards, and roundup police for the trains. Then the Einstatsgruppen got over worked and needed help. So they sent the police reserve.

 The thing that makes the book so interesting is that almost all information relating to the holocaust is from the victors perspective. So we get a lot from the victims, which has the effect of us envisioning the murderers as a stereotypical nazis, grouping them into a easily identifiable "Not Us", "never happen here" "other" category.

  The nazis , understandably, tried to get rid of the records. IIRC, the info the author based his book on was discovered lost in the basement of a Bavarian police station, and found it as he was researching info for something else.

 This book, above all else, was what convinced me that,  Yes,  it really CAN happen here. Like most, they just did their jobs, did what they were told, no different than most of the worlds population. And we do not, anymore, have a ethic of the rugged individualist- the woodsman, the cowboy, ride tall, shoot straight and speak the truth, the scouts motto, all so old fashioned, if known at all.
 All the malleable subjective "truths" taught now  is make compliant little  potential killers.

[French G.]

I read a ton of Holocaust history, another one around here I can't remember the title focuses on einsatzgruppen and is more detailed technically and draws a line from the early mass shooting methods and their inefficiency to the later death camps. Typical Germans, they studied how to most efficiently Staci victims in mass graves, eventually concluding that making living victims lie down on the dead was best. How does a population get that passive?

The other thing I get is the extreme left gets wound up about Trump's Nazis. I look at the left and see plenty of willing Orpo recruits.

[just Warren]

Mordechai Anielewicz, one of the great heroes of modern times.