The following guest post was written by Prof. Ilan Sadeh, a native-born Israeli, child of Holocaust survivors and now a professor of computer science at a Chinese university. The original was published in Hebrew by HaGadah HaSmolit [“The Left Bank”]:
Following the Holocaust, Poet Avraham Shlonsky wrote his poem, Oath:
“I took an oath to remember everything.
To remember it all and not to forget.
Not to forget anything – until the tenth generation.”
“By these eyes that seen the woe and grief,
Their outcries heaving to my heart’s embrace,
By compassion which taught me condone and forgive
Till days did come too awful for grace…”
I’ve taken this oath: as I breathe and live
To remember everything, every place.
Until the tenth generation – forget no jot,
Until each of my insults be completely assuaged,
Until the last of my lashed has chastened their lot.
Cry heaven, if in vain was this night outraged,Cry heaven, if by morning I resume my tread
And all this from my mind disengage.
–translated by Dov Vardi
Was the oath kept? It seems not. The Zionist functionaries did not wait until the tenth generation. Following are several examples of terms related to the Holocaust which were cynically exploited by the Zionists:
Nitzol Shoah – Saved from the Holocaust
Inaccurate, they were not saved, no one [except a tiny group of the Orthodox and some renegade Zionists in the Vaad Hatzolah] tried to save them. “Holocaust Remnants” or “Holocaust Survivors,” as defined in English, are terms that are more accurate.
She’erit HaPleta – The Surviving Remnant
Ben Gurion used this term, derived of the Old Testament, to describe the Holocaust survivors. This term, in ordinary Hebrew, offers a demeaning connotation.
Avak Adam – Riffraff
The Zionist activists, mainly Ben Gurion, often used this term to describe Holocaust survivors. The term was used once again in the 1950s, directed mainly toward the Oriental Jews. Zionism, similar to fascism and Nazism, categorized people by their counties of origin. The Sabras [first generation Israelis] are “pioneers,” “masters of the land,” “salt of the earth,” “a supreme race.”
Diaspora Jews, especially Holocaust survivors, were a lower human form – “scum.” The truth is that Diaspora Jews were hard-working, subsisting on manual labor and contributing to the Zionist effort. It was actually the Zionist activists who were parasites, living on donations from Diaspora Jews.
Israeli arrogance ended with the Yom Kippur War. The leadership was broken. Talk of the “destruction of the third temple” and a willingness to launch a nuclear missile caused a complete sense of panic. We were saved by American support, support that was not afforded to the six-million and to the Holocaust survivors.
Yad VaShem
Yad Vashem is an institution created under the Martyrs’ and Heroes Remembrance (Yad Vashem) Law 5713-1953. Its objective is to document the history of the Jewish people before and during the Holocaust, perpetuate the life stories and memory of the millions of those murdered, and to instill the Holocaust legacy in future generations. In practice, in addition to its legal mandate, the institution serves as Israel’s propaganda bureau.
“Holocaust Researchers”
Historians, usually Jews, have aggrandized and exalted their reputation by obsessively dealing with the Holocaust of the European Jews. Most of them have no connection to the Holocaust. The “Holocaust Industry,” which grew and continues to grow, has brought forth these wild weeds. Seeing that the issue is saturated with interests and politics, such “Holocaust studies” are biased and unreliable. It is difficult to trust the “research.” The “research budgets” are higher than those allocated to other academic studies and they are usually allocated by factors within the Zionist establishment, with corresponding results.
“Why didn’t you rebel?”
Holocaust survivors were forced to deal with this accusation. There were “Holocaust researchers” like Raul Hilberg, who got a bit carried away with this trend. The fact is that there was no use in rebelling, as proven in the Warsaw Ghetto and similar attempts in Krakow, Vilna and other ghettos. There were uprisings and attempted rebellions. The outcomes were insignificant, mainly because they received no help from outside, especially in Poland. The atmosphere was often hostile and the German reaction was harsh and brutal, collectively directed toward the entire community. (As it was, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a battle that lasted longer than many of the battles the Germans “fought” when they occupied other European countries.)
Every modern army operates a performance research unit, which calculates the probability of success of a military operation. No military unit embarks on a mission when the chances of success are lower than a certain level. The chances of a ghetto rebellion succeeding were nil. In other words, they had no chance of defeating the German army, thus all such attempts were in vain. It is painful to say it, but the correct approach, statistically, was to survive at all costs, whether by bearing the suffering, perseverance and mutual aid, or by way of escape or negotiation. Rebellion was to no avail.
One of my mother’s relatives, a young man named Immerglik, who took part in the assault on the German officers at the Cyganeria Café in Krakow in December 1942. He disappeared, his body was never found.
“Soaps”
A nickname coined by the Sabras during the 1948 War of Independence, a relic of the soap industry that developed in the death camps (a tale that probably has no grounding in reality). The nickname portrayed the “Holocaust Remnants” as pale, cowardly and weak, as compared to the tanned, brawny and heroic Sabras. They called the survivors cakes of soap.
But during WWII, the tanned Sabras evaded service and even digging ditches. Being citizens of the British Mandate, they were not obligated to enlist. There were indeed some who volunteered and enlisted for combat duty in the British army, but the vast majority found ways to evade combat. Some did so in a “Zionist” manner, others just shirked the responsibility and acted for their own benefit.
The fallen soldiers of the 1948 War of Independence were: 3000 of the original settlement, which consisted of 600,000 individuals, and 3000 “soap” soldiers, derived from a population of 60,000 men and women who immigrated to Israel in 1941-1948. These “cakes of soap” comprised 5% of the population, while the figure of those in service from the old settlement was 0.5%.
In other words, the number of fallen “ cakes of soap” was ten times greater than the fallen Sabras.
“Criminals and Prostitutes”
The Zionist activists spread the notion that those who survived were most probably criminals or prostitutes. The truth is that there was hardly any crime and there was no prostitution, not in the ghettos nor in the camps. Judenrat administration of the ghettos was usually fair. The Jews in the camps, excluding the Kapo, retained their humanity. There was a great deal of mutual assistance. It is important to note that the Holocaust survivors are worthy of great respect for their conduct in the Valley of Death.
In October 1945, Palmach commander Yitzhak Sadeh published a story called “My Sister on the Beach.” It told the story of Yitzhak Sadeh, a romantic man, as he met an immigrant coming off a ship at night. Sadeh calls the young woman “my sister.” He notices that she is tattooed with the words “For Officers Only.” He realizes that she was forced to serve the Nazis as a prostitute and that she was sterilized. He swears: “For my sisters like her, I shall be strong. For my sisters like her, I shall be brave. For my sisters like her, I shall be cruel.”
Through his story, Sadeh tried to motivate youngsters to enlist in the efforts for illegal immigration. However, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The story is entirely a figment of Yitzhak Sadeh’s romantic imagination. However, he unintentionally helped create the “prostitute” image that stuck to the Holocaust survivors.
The facts are that tattoos were only applied in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The tattoos consisted of numbers only. Yitzhak Sadeh could not have met a woman whose tattoo was not a number. Auschwitz indeed operated a brothel for the German staff. But Jewish women were not employed as whores. All of the prostitutes were German and Polish. It is true that Dr. Mengele and others performed experiments on Jewish women and that they were indeed sterilized.
“Like Sheep to the Slaughter”
This wretched term was taken from the words of Abba Kovner, appearing in a proclamation published to residents of the Vilna Ghetto. The Hebrew translation by Kovner read, “We must not go like lambs to the slaughter.” Y.Y. Agnon, in his book, The Sign, distinguished between the Jews of Israel and the Jews of the Diaspora: “It is better to live in Israel than outside of it, as Israel has granted us the power to stand up for ourselves, unlike the Diaspora where we walked toward our enemy like lambs to the slaughter.”
Agnon made the use of the term acceptable. He had a limited capacity to understand. Although he was awarded a Nobel Prize, he in no way measured up to Janusz Korczak. The Jewish leadership should have stopped the spreading of such poison. It did not. Holocaust survivors were a trampled lot.
People of the old settlement ridiculed the Holocaust survivors regarding their conduct during the Holocaust. In so doing, they poured salt on wounds that never healed. During the Yom Kippur War and in others, soldiers were taken captive and murdered. Did they go as lambs to the slaughter?
“1967 Borders = Auschwitz Borders”
In an interview with Der Spiegel in 1969, Israel’s mythical Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abba Eban, compared the 1967 borders to the borders of Auschwitz, no less. The distinguished figure was among the symbols of Israel’s Labor Party. He was known for his strong affinity for finer things in life. He chose to justify the Occupation in Oxford English, using Auschwitz as the excuse. This statement reflects the Zionist activists’ frame of mind: Auschwitz was the ultimate excuse for everything. Netanyahu, in his scary Holocaust speeches, does not say anything new. Abba Eban said the same thing long before him.
“There is room for comparing the Holocaust to the current period”
A statement by Benjamin Netanyahu. He often repeats this motif in his speeches. It is hard to believe, but Israel’s Prime Minister blatantly compares the European Jews during the Holocaust and the acts of annihilation by Nazi Germany to the hostile relations between Israel and Iran. He made this statement 70 years after the Holocaust, but he does not understand that there is no room for comparing the Holocaust to Iran. He does not understand the difference… an entire country does not understand the difference. This is the result of Zionist propaganda’s cynical exploitation of the Holocaust.
“Obama will march the Israelis to the oven”
The strong Zionist lobby and the money held by affluent pro-Israel American Jews have led the Republican presidential candidates to speak out shamefully against Barack Obama. On 26 July 2015, Mike Huckabee told Breitbart News that Obama’s foreign policy is the “most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”
What can be said? Perhaps, in his defense, Huckabee will claim that this statement is a direct continuation of Netanyahu’s comparison between the Holocaust and the Iranian threat.
“We have a historical recollection of what happens when Jewish products are marked”
These are Netanyahu’s words in September 2015 regarding the marking of products from settlements in the West Bank. The Prime Minister is reminded of the Holocaust, no less. Another example of his nauseating abuse of the memory of the Holocaust. With these statements, he is devaluing the Holocaust, perhaps even denying the Holocaust.
There is no similarity between marking products manufactured in the Occupied Territories and the Holocaust. Products manufactured in the Occupied Territories were not manufactured in Israel, thus there is nothing wrong with noting this fact. There is a great distance between this and the Holocaust. Marking products manufactured under and within Occupation is not an “anti-Semitic measure.” It is a legitimate tool for non-violent resistance to a cruel Occupation. One finds it difficult to comprehend the nerve of the Israeli politicians, such as Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Adolph Hitler did not want to exterminate the Jews, he wanted to expel them, so he met with the Mufti of Jerusalem who convinced him to “burn” the Jews. This is how the Holocaust was born.
This awful statement was not made by the Town Fool, but rather by Israel’s Prime Minister. It was not said in wrath, nor as a passing note or a slip of the tongue. This statement represents his belief and he said it in a speech before the most senior forum of the World Zionist Congress on 20 October 2015:
“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time; he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini [the Mufti of Jerusalem] went to Hitler and said, “If you expel them, they’ll all come here.” “So what should I do with them?” he asked. He said, “Burn them.”
My father’s entire family was murdered: babies, children, adults and the elderly. They were killed by the German Einstantzgruppen in the Kostapil valley of death in Ukraine in August 1941. Hitler met the Mufti in November 1941. The truth is that the murderous Holocaust began immediately upon the commencement of the Barbarossa Operation, on 22 June 1941.
Netanyahu presents blatant lies.
Furthermore, according to Netanyahu Hitler was not so bad after all. The Germans are not really to blame. It is the Palestinians who initiated the murder of the six-million. The Prime Minister’s libelous and inciting statement actually absolves Adolf Hitler, passing the blame to Mufti Husseini – Abu Mazen’s supposed spiritual mentor.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a stupid man; Benjamin Netanyahu is a liar. But even stupidity and lies have their limits. Had it been any other issue, his statement would have seemed like one more of the lies and misrepresentations so characteristic of Netanyahu. But Netanyahu crossed the line.
His words are no longer a political manipulation, they are something new. Had the leader of a foreign country dared to disseminate such lies, so supportive of Adolf Hitler, he would immediately be condemned and deposed. Israel’s Prime Minister, however, was forgiven…
As he spoke these lies none of the delegates to the Zionist Congress objected. No one stood and shouted to Israel’s Prime Minister: Be quiet! Get out of here! When the libelous speech ended, there was no denial or condemnation by Yad VaShem whose role it should be. By its very mission, Yad VaShem should have issued a severe reprimand, but none was made.
The Parties of the governing coalition remained silent. None spoke up against the Prime Minister. I point an accusatory finger, mainly at Minister Yaakov Litzman, Chairman of “Torah Judaism.” Litzman, among the most honest politicians in the Knesset and a son of Holocaust survivors, knows the truth.
The “justice” system said nothing, it is not important enough for it.
Official auditing functions, like the State Auditor, remained silent. The State Auditor does not care, although that is exactly what the auditing authority is required to do. Had the State Auditor been a worthy man, he would have taken a stand. The State Auditor in 2015, Yossef Shapira, appointed by the Knesset with Benjamin Netanyahu’s active support, was a weak man. Yossef Shapira kept quiet. Yossef Shapira knows why.
Embarrassingly so, it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel who was fair and immediately published a clarification. Merkel placed all of the blame on the German people.
The opinions expressed are those of the author.
This is one of the most powerful and one of the saddest things I have ever read.
Thank you Richard for exposing the dark underbelly of zionism, their despicable treatment of even the Jewish people they cynically proclaim to save. Shame on them.
Sorry for your loss, the tragedy of 1941
In the meantime one thing only.
” The story is entirely a figment of Yitzhak Sadeh’s romantic imagination. However, he unintentionally helped create the “prostitute” image that stuck to the Holocaust survivors.”
My mother was in Auschwitz and saw Mengele at least 2 times a week. She was sent to the death line twice and ran away and he just laughed saying ‘you will eventually get there”.
My mother had a friend who is still alive today who is Jewish and blonde with all the other ‘attributes’ making her look Aryan but the Nazis knew she was Jewish.
Tattooed on her chest was “Feld-Hure’.
You are mocking and distorting the facts on Holocaust matters.
Have you or family members offered this evidence/testimony with relevant details to Yad VaShem, or other research institutions? If not, you should. It is always better when things are well documented and verified, and not remain anecdotes.
Who was the camp whore?
Press photographer Paul Goldman achieved fame because of two pictures: one of David Ben-Gurion doing a headstand, and one of a woman revealing an inscription in German tattooed on her chest – “camp whore” – along with a number. Evidently, she was a Jewish woman who was forced to serve the Nazis as a whore in Auschwitz. Her face is not visible in the photograph. For several years, some have claimed that the photo was staged, and the claim was recently raised again, on the London & Kirschenbaum news program. Na’ama Shik, of Yad Vashem’s Institute for Holocaust Education, asserts on the basis of doctoral research that the Nazis did not employ Jewish prostitutes in the camp, and that at the time they used the series of numbers seen in the picture at Auschwitz, numbers were no longer etched on prisoners’ chests, but only on their arms. There are other things that arouse suspicion, too.
Photographer and Israel Prize Laureate David Rubinger, who found Goldman’s collection of negatives, saw to their restoration and oversees the showing of his pictures, admired Goldman and would like to believe that the photograph is not fabricated. Goldman’s records indicate that the picture was taken in 1945 in Nahalal. It is possible that on the same occasion, Goldman also captured the visit of Chaim Weizmann.
This week, Rubinger returned to the negatives of the picture and noticed a stunning detail he had not been aware of before: There are three negatives of the photograph and they have been trimmed all around with scissors, apparently to conceal the identity of the woman in the picture. Goldman may have tampered with the negative in order to protect the woman; or he may have done so to protect himself.
The belief that the Nazis used Jewish women as prostitutes apparently became rooted in the Israeli memory of the Holocaust as a result of an article published by Yitzhak Sadeh in October 1945, entitled “My Sister on the Beach.” It told of a female Holocaust survivor who arrives on an illegal immigrant ship and told Sadeh of her life as a whore in the service of the Nazis. According to Sadeh, the words “For officers only” were engraved on the woman’s chest. The circumstances of this encounter are described in Sadeh’s biography, which was written by Zvika Dror.
Holocaust writer Yehiel Dinur (also known as K. Zetnik) maintained that the woman was a relative of his. In his book “Beit Habubot” (“The House of Dolls”), he described a Jewish prostitute and said it was his sister. The covers of several editions of K. Zetnik’s book feature a drawing and photograph that are very similar to Goldman’s, but the number on the woman’s chest is apparently different.
A possible solution to the mystery: Perhaps Goldman prepared the photograph to serve as the cover of K. Zetnik’s book. It’s doubtful whether the notation in his archive is correct: Weizmann visited Nahalal in December 1944, and at the time there were no female survivors from Auschwitz there.
At some point later on, four female Holocaust survivors did come to Nahalal. Yizraela Bloch, who oversees the local archive, said this week that she remembers them all: She lived with them in the same room. She says not one of them had a tattoo on her chest. David Rubinger is uncomfortable with the possibility that this is a fabricated picture, but as long as the mystery remains unsolved, he is not putting the picture away. This week it is on display in an exhibition in Singapore.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/dreaming-with-shimon-1.225831
Yehiel Dinur/De Nur seems to be a truly unreliable witness, if he can be called that. His biographer claims he had no sister.
http://www.haaretz.com/breaking-the-code-1.274700
In his 1961 book Piepel, about Nazi sexual abuse of young boys, he suggests the subject of this book was his younger brother, who also died in a concentration camp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehiel_De-Nur
Two siblings who were sexually abused by the Nazi’s is a lot.
About Doll’s House:
“Though a Holocaust classic, many scholars now describe it as pornographic and likely made up.
“It was fiction,” said Na’ama Shik, a researcher at Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority. “There were no Jewish whores in Auschwitz.”
Yet “Doll’s House” and other writings of K. Tzetnik, who died in 2001, are treated as historical fact by many in Israel, and are included in the high school curriculum. Mr. Libsker’s movie shows the vice principal of an Israeli school guiding a group of teenagers through Auschwitz, pointing out Block 24 and quoting from K. Tzetnik.”
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=51780
Mottel, there is only one extant picture of a woman with such a tattoo, and its authenticity is in question (for one thing “at the time they used the series of numbers seen in the picture at Auschwitz, numbers were no longer etched on prisoners’ chests, but only on their arms”).
If you are against ‘mocking and distorting’ the Holocaust, why are you not willing to help taking your assertion out of the realm of anecdote?
You have not reacted, and I am now thinking that the one mocking and distorting is you.
My mother passed away last September but I have seen it and I believe it is among her things. My mother had had contact with her in the past as she was living in South America. The things are in Montreal and I am in Israel at the present but I will be there soon and if it is there I will copy it to this blog.
I don’t see why you should doubt me as one who grew up under the shadow of the Holocaust and believe me my mother was not normal after Aushwitz.
It also seems to me that people on this site have a tendency to debunk facts of the Holocaust, at sort of ‘banality of evil’ syndrome. It reminds me of Norman Finkelstein claiming the ‘holocaust industry’ and there is some truth in this but he himself industrializes it more than anyone else.
As a Holocaust child my childhood was spent with ‘survivors’ and you have no idea of what I experienced on a quotidian basis and I therefore feel no obligation to forward the picture for as is normal on this blog someone will find something else in order to debunk it. However for the sake of deniers if it is in my mother’s things I will send it
This is what you wrote:
“My mother had a friend who is still alive today who is Jewish and blonde with all the other ‘attributes’ making her look Aryan but the Nazis knew she was Jewish.
Tattooed on her chest was “Feld-Hure’.”
I thought you had known the woman and seen the tattoo yourself, but I now understand that you probably saw a picture of the woman with the tattoo. It may be a copy of the picture already discussed, but if it is not it may be important. (There is still attention for this issue as you can see from the fact that newspaper articles are still being published about it. )
Can’t you contact the woman, as she is still alive or provide Yad VaShem with her name?
No one is denying the Holocaust here, but sexualizing and sensationalizing it, in the way K. Zetnik and others (the writers of the Stalag porn novels) have done, is repulsive. I hope you agree.
This picture for instance is pure sexploitation, and demeaning to women and Holocaust victims alike.
http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1394361833l/1160450.jpg
And the claim on the book cover that it is “as real as Anne Frank’s diary” is an outrage that does not do the memory of the Holocaust any good.
Richard. You know that Israel’s Ministry of Education has been sending Israeli high school kids on free trips to the concentration camps in Poland for decades.
It is a searing memory. When they took my niece’s class to the gas chambers, she retched.
Richard. Have you been to the concentration camps?
@ Abby: Forcing impressionable young people to visit concentration camps on a ZIonist ideological mission is an abomination. For some idiotic reason, the Polish government even allows IAF F-16s to overfly the crematoria as if somehow the Israeli air force could’ve saved Polish Jewry if there had only been one at the time. It’s wretched & offensive & stupid.
I have seen the ridiculous Israeli flags sticking out of the crematoria and it makes me want to retch. The idea what Zionism is somehow the only response to genocide is simply ass backward.
No Israeli student is forced to go to the concentration camps and no school in Israel is forced to send their students there either.
You’re exaggerated moral repugnance belies the fact that you’ve made the personal choice never to visit the concentration camps.
Richard. Is it okay for impressionable kids to visit Yad Vashem? The Holocaust Memorial in Washington, D.C.?
@ Abby: I don’t care whether they’re forced to go or not. The fact is that schools in Israel send large numbers of students in an act of profound cult death worship. They worship the dead at the altar of Zionism. It’s a repulsive exploitation of children for political/ideological purposes.
You moron. How do you think I know there are Israeli flags on the doors of the ovens? Did I invent it? You will retract this fatuous lie within the next hour or I will moderate you.
I retract it.
@ Abby: I visited Terezin where I was repulsed by the hijacking of genocide for the benefit of Zionist propaganda. The Holocaust is a profound, almost unfathomably evil event which should exist on its own terms & not be exploited & degraded by such tomfoolery.
Just to put it out there – those trips are not free!
They are subsidized but still cost over 5,000 shekel.
Jewish women not allowed
“It remains one of the lesser known aspects of Nazi terror that Sachsenhausen, Dachau and even Auschwitz included brothels, and that female concentration camp prisoners were forced into prostitution. Berlin-based cultural studies scholar Robert Sommer, 34, has scoured archives and concentration camp memorial sites around the world and carried out numerous interviews with historical witnesses over the past nine years. His study, which will be published this month, provides the first comprehensive, scientific survey of this “especially perfidious form of violence in the concentration camps.” His research has largely informed a traveling exhibition “Camp brothels — forced sex work in Nazi concentration camps,” which will tour several memorial sites next year.
…
Altogether some 200 women shared the fate of the Mauthausen prisoners in the camp brothels. In particular healthy and good-looking women prisoners between the ages of 17 and 35 caught the eye of SS recruiters. More than 60 percent of them were of German nationality, but Polish women, those from the Soviet Union and one Dutch woman were transferred into the “special task forces.” The Nazis didn’t allow Jewish women for “racial hygiene” reasons. First the women were sent to the camp hospital, where they were given calcium injections, disinfection baths, better food and a stint under a sunlamp”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/concentration-camp-bordellos-the-main-thing-was-to-survive-at-all-a-632558.html
“The Holocaust:
Non-Jewish Victims
by Terese Pencak Schwartz
Who Were the Five Million Non-Jewish Holocaust Victims?
Of the 11 million people killed during the Holocaust, six million were Polish citizens. Three million were Polish Jews and another three million were Polish Christians. Most of the remaining victims were from other countries including Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Russia, Holland, France and even Germany.”
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/NonJewishVictims.html
Thank you for that history Richard, and reader comments. I, and I suspect many others, especially non-Jews like myself, just had no idea.
Thank you for the History lesson, Richard. I thought that Jewish women were taken as prostitutes because that’s what shown on Schindler’s list… and I took for granted.
I do not recall that from Schindler’s list. Are you sure?
@Mottel
You wrote:
“I don’t see why you should doubt me as one who grew up under the shadow of the Holocaust and believe me my mother was not normal after Aushwitz.
It also seems to me that people on this site have a tendency to debunk facts of the Holocaust, at sort of ‘banality of evil’ syndrome. It reminds me of Norman Finkelstein … As a Holocaust child my childhood was spent with ‘survivors’ and you have no idea of what I experienced on a quotidian basis”
Well your statements here do, in fact. also remind me of stuff from Norman Finkelstein, in particular this scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7tupJRSi7M
That your mother was in Auschwitz was terrible for her and for you but it doesn’t make you an expert witness on the holocaust.
Against your memory of a photograph, stands the testimony of Na’ama Shik, a researcher of Yad Vashem’s Institute for Holocaust Education, and also that of the main German researcher on the topic, Robert Sommer. They are both positive that no Jewish women were involved in this camp prostitution and that Jews were not allowed to visit those brothels. This is no news for those who have known about the Nazi “crime” of “Rassenschande” for a long time.
So your loose talk about the “banality of evil” syndrome (a totally irrelevant term here showing that you have never understood what it stands for) and about “deniers” does not cut any ice. The “denier” is you.
I add two more reports::
Nazi sex slave story finally told at camp
A new exhibition at Nazi concentration camp Ravensbrück near Berlin details the fate of women forced to work as sex slaves for fellow prisoners during World War II.
•
“They told us we were in the camp brothel, that we were the lucky ones. We would eat well and have enough to drink. If we behaved and fulfilled our duties nothing would happen to us.”
So begins the wrenching account of Frau W., a prisoner of the Nazi concentration camp Ravensbrück north of Berlin who was forced to work as a sex slave for her fellow detainees.
Her story forms the centrepiece of a new exhibition at Ravensbrück about the fate of women pressed into prostitution between 1942 and 1945, like Asia’s ‘comfort women’ during World War II.
But rather than servicing soldiers, these women were made to have sex with the forced labourers – an idea from SS chief Heinrich Himmler to increase productivity try to prevent homosexuality from ‘breaking out’ among their ranks.
Their numbers were far smaller than the tens of thousands of ‘comfort women’ kidnapped across Asia to serve Japanese troops.
But Ravensbrück centre director Insa Eschebach said the at least 200, predominantly German women who were enslaved also endured paralysing trauma, shame and scorn in an until-now largely taboo chapter of European history.
Most of the sex workers were taken from the women’s camps at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz to ‘brothels’ at 10 camps in Germany and the Nazi-occupied eastern territories.
The vast majority had been imprisoned for ‘anti-social’ behaviour – a crime arbitrarily defined under Hitler to include prostitutes but also women with suspect political ties or relationships with Jews.
Those prisoners who had a privileged place in the camp hierarchy – exhibition curator Michael Sommer estimates about one percent of the forced labourers – could buy up to a quarter of an hour with one of the women for two Reichsmarks from the pittance they earned in the Nazi-run factories.
A fraction of that amount was credited to women’s camp accounts which they could use for food when it was available.
“The sex work was organised very bureaucratically,” said Sommer, showing prisoner files with the code 998 signifying a prostitute and vouchers used by men allowed to visit the camp brothel.
No Jews worked at the brothels or were allowed to patronise them, and separate facilities were created for camp guards.” …
http://www.thelocal.de/20090228/17711
New book reveals horror of Nazi camp brothels
BERLIN | BY DAVE GRAHAM
In 1942, the Nazis decided that forced laborers in concentration camps would work harder if they were promised sex — so they made female prisoners work in brothels for them.
The brothels form the subject of “Das KZ Bordell” (The Concentration Camp Brothel) by Robert Sommer, a book that has been hailed as the first comprehensive account of a little known chapter of Nazi oppression in World War Two.
Sommer’s 460-page work, due to be presented at the Berlin state parliament on Wednesday, explores the origins, structure and impact of the “Sonderbauten” (special buildings) run by Heinrich Himmler’s SS in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe.
“In the collective memory and written history of World War Two, the camp brothels were for a long time taboo,” the 35-year-old Berliner told Reuters. “The former prisoners didn’t want to talk about it: it was a difficult subject to handle.
“It didn’t fit so easily into the postwar image of the concentration camps as monuments to suffering.”
Beginning with the Austrian camp at Mauthausen in 1942, the SS opened 10 brothels, the biggest of which was in Auschwitz, in modern Poland, where as many as 21 women prisoners once worked. The last opened in early 1945, the year the war ended.
The chapter is separate from the annals of the Holocaust of European Jews. Jewish women were not recruited as prostitutes, and Jewish men were not admitted to the brothels.
Sommer estimates around 200 women inmates in total were forced to work in the brothels — initially offered the prospect of escaping the brutality of the concentration camps.
“They were promised release after half a year if they served in the brothel. But the promises were never honored,” he said. “Later, the SS just selected women they felt were suitable.”
“Jews were not allowed in. Neither were Soviet prisoners of war,” he added. “Jewish women did not serve as sex workers.”
In the discussion about a book with the tile “Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust”. by Rochelle Saidel and Sonya Hedgepeth, I found this remark:
“As for the argument that racial purity laws protected Jewish women, she says, “That’s absurd. That’s like saying there are laws against rape so people don’t get raped.”
Such laws, she and others add, certainly didn’t influence the actions of Nazi collaborators who weren’t Aryan.”
I agree with that but such laws DID have an effect in institutionalized and supervised set ups like camp brothels. I haven’t seen the book and from the discussion it is not clear whether these authors hold that Jewish women were employed in such brothels. I would be very surprised if they did.
From the overall discussion it is clear that the incidence of rape was limited. The emphasis was on transport and killing.