#the einsatzgruppen

[er1chartmann]

EINSATZGRUPPEN

These are some facts and curiosities about the Einsatzgruppen, The Death Squads:

The origins of the Einsatzgruppen can be traced back to the creation of a dedicated Einsatzkommando by Reinhard Heydrich for the purpose of safeguarding government buildings and the documents contained therein during the annexation of Austria by Germany in March 1938.

For the Polish campaign Heydrich again formed the Einsatzgruppen to follow the advance of the German armies but, unlike previous operations, he gave the commanders of these units carte blanche to kill members of those groups that the Germans considered hostile.

After the invasion of Poland the Einsatzgruppen began that career of "death squads" which made them sadly famous by "beheading" the Polish intelligentsia and killing politicians, scholars, teachers and members of the clergy.

In May 1940, during the invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium and France, the Einsatzgruppen were activated once again to follow the advance of the Wehrmacht, but, unlike what had happened in Poland, in this case they were limited to the task originally for the protection of public buildings and documents.

During the invasion of the Soviet Union which began in June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen killed Jews, partisans and members of the Communist Party on a much larger scale than in Poland.

Each Einsatzgruppe, divided into operational units called Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, was logistically dependent on the German army's army groups but totally independent from them for the "special tasks" that were entrusted to it, having to report exclusively to the SS- und Polizeiführer ("Commander of the SS and Police») of the area of ​​use.

Within a short time the Einsatzgruppen were increasingly involved in the direct mass killing - the organization of "spontaneous" pogroms had not given the desired results - of Jewish Soviet citizens.

Initially the men of the Einsatzgruppen refrained from killing women and children but Himmler's calls for greater "harshness" quickly changed things and, starting from July-August 1941, the massacres also extended to these categories.

The most efficient of the Einsatzgruppen engaged in the Soviet Union was Einsatzgruppe A which operated in the Baltic republics (Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia) occupied by the Soviets in 1939. -

The unit was the first Einsatzgruppe to complete its intended task of eliminating all Jews in its area of ​​responsibility, making it judenfrei ("Jew-free"). -

After December 1941 the other three Einsatzgruppen began what the historian Raul Hilberg called the "second sweep", which ended in the summer of 1942, trying to reach the results obtained by Einsatzgruppe A.

It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen killed around 1,500,000 people in the Soviet Union: Jews, communists, prisoners of war and gypsies. In addition to their extermination tasks, the Einsatzgruppen were also widely used in anti-partisan warfare.

The Einsatzgruppen were never permanent units but rather departments created ad hoc using personnel from the ranks of the SS, the SD and from various departments of the German police such as the Ordnungspolizei, the gendarmerie, the Kripo and the Gestapo.

The commanders and main coordinators of the Einsatzgruppen were tried on charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes and SS affiliation

Commanders:

Einsatzgruppe A: SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker (until 23 March 1942)

Einsatzgruppe B: SS-Brigadeführer Arthur Nebe (until October 1941)

Einsatzgruppe C: SS-Gruppenführer Dr. Otto Rasch (until October 1941)

Einsatzgruppe D: SS-Gruppenführer Prof. Otto Ohlendorf (until June 1942)

Sources:

Wikipedia: Einsatzgruppen

Military Wiki: Einsatzgruppen

❗❗I DON'T SUPPORT NAZISM,FASCISM OR ZIONISM IN ANY WAY, THIS IS AN EDUCATIONAL POST❗❗

[eretzyisrael]

Benjamin Ferencz was born on March 11, 1920, to a Jewish family in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania. He was only 10 months old when his family moved to the United States and settled in the Lower East Side. In 1943, Ferencz graduated from Harvard Law School and enlisted in the U.S. Army as America was preparing to invade France. He served under General Patton and was awarded 5 battle stars. Towards the end of WWII, Ferencz was appointed as a war crimes investigator in the newly established War Crimes Branch of the U.S. Army. He gathered proof of Nazi brutality to convict individuals of international war crimes. Ferencz was a first-hand witness of the atrocities committed by the Nazis and was among the U.S. forces that liberated several concentration camps.  When asked about what he had witnessed, Ferencz said, “My mind would not accept what my eyes saw. … I had peered into hell.” By the end of 1945, Ferencz returned to New York and was soon recruited by the U.S. Government to join the team for the Nuremberg Trials. At just 27 years old, Ferencz was appointed Chief Prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen Trial, which is considered the biggest murder trial in history. Ferencz and his team were responsible for the convictions of 22 Nazi death squad commanders, guilty of genocidal war crimes and crimes against humanity and were charged with the murder of over one million people. Here is a photo from this time last year on his 103rd birthday, reminding us to “do something that you love.” 

Ferencz passed away just a few weeks later on April 7, 2023. May his memory be a blessing.

humansofjudaism

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

Source

[playitagin]

1942 – The Holocaust in Ukraine

The SS executes 588 Jewish residents of the Podolian town of Zinkiv (Khmelnytska oblast. The Zoludek Ghetto (in Belarus) is destroyed and all its inhabitants executed or deported.

*Photos and articles don't always match

[lizzybgood]

Do you ever knowingly watch a documentary about something horrible like the Holocaust? Knowing what is going to happen. Just not really prepared to see it.. I know from history it was vile and disgusting. Seeing it happen on film via the people doing it just..leaves you shocked and emotionally raw. Most documentaries only talk about the concentration camps. This one talked about the multiple mass graves which I never heard about from other documentaries. I just there are no words.

[applesauce42069]

so if people didn't hear what happened in calgary, essentially:

yes, that is a nazi salute. yes, that is the leader of Iran.

what is not visible in this photo is the pro-palestine protestors he was standing with. in the videos that circulated, you can see a blonde woman in a keffiyeh walk up to him, say something, and then walk away. there are people with keffiyehs and pro-palestine signs all around him.

they are the people who concern me the most. they claim to be pro palestine, pro justice and peace and equality. a man, standing in their protest, did a nazi salute, and none of them stopped him.

i'm a jew and the descendant of holocaust survivors and victims. if someone did a nazi salute in my vicinity and it was safe to do so, i would go bat shit on them.

so why did no one stop him?

i feel like is is emblematic of how antisemitism spreads among pro-palestine leftists. they don't set out to be antisemitic. they don't want to be antisemitic because its wrong to be prejudiced. but the antisemitism begins to slip through the cracks. they usually don't know enough about jewish people, jewish history, or antisemitism in general to counter it. the effect is slow, but damning. eventually these antisemitic symbols lose their meaning, become less important. so even in the face of something this overt, people don't stop it.

all i can say is that its truly disgusting that people turned the very real, longstanding oppression of palestinians by the israeli state into an excuse to spread violent, hateful, and harmful rhetoric at the expense of jewish people around the world.

and i would also like to say: my grandmother grew up in communist poland, raised by a holocaust survivor mother who had lost her own mother and sisters, likely to the nazi death squads east of Poland, the Einsatzgruppen, as they were trying to flee. Her father may have never met her, having died in the polish people's army around the same time she was born. all her life she wanted to come to canada, because it was safe and bountiful. she brought her family here, and i've always felt lucky for it. now we have people throwing up nazi salutes in our streets to celebrate the attempted bombing of our family members.

antisemitism is a plague.

[sayruq]

The Hamas massacres on October 7, 2023 mark a turning point in the history of anti-Semitism and in the development of the Middle East conflict. More than 1,200 Israelis were massacred and more than 200 were taken hostage. Some felt the anti-Jewish atrocities reminded them of the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in the Third Reich. In fact, Hamas' anti-Semitism follows the tradition of the National Socialist will to destroy. Nazi Germany had already discovered the anti-Semitic potential of the Koran in the 1930s and exploited it for its own propaganda in the Arab world. Zeesen, a shortwave transmitter stationed south of Berlin, deliberately spread Islamic anti-Semitism among Muslims. The radio broadcasts were broadcast daily between April 1939 and April 1945 in Arabic, but also in Persian and Turkish. Just as the Nazis radicalized Christian anti-Judaism in Europe, they took Muslim anti-Judaism as a basis in the Middle East in order to link it to the European anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. In his book “Nazis and the Middle East. “How Islamic Anti-Semitism Came About” our speaker sheds light on this previously ignored chapter of Germany’s past and, based on new archive finds, shows how the image of Jews in Islam changed between 1937 and 1948 under the influence of sophisticated Arabic-language radio propaganda and other Nazi activities. The Middle East's encounter with Nazi ideology may have been brief, but it continues to have an impact today. Because while Nazi anti-Semitism was discredited everywhere else in the world, it was able to survive as a worldview in the Arab world. Only when we understand how strongly modern Middle East history is shaped by the after-effects of National Socialism will we be able to correctly interpret the hatred of Jews in this region and its echo among Muslims in Europe and develop adequate countermeasures.

Instagram page of the event

[historicity-was-already-taken]

Some thoughts on learning the Holocaust.

There is no scale of suffering, or trauma, or hell. Someone who survived Treblinka and someone who survived Bergen Belsen both went through hell, just different versions of it. Holocaust survivors all experienced variations of hell, from Denmark to Minsk.

But when LEARNING about the Holocaust, it’s extremely normal to learn about it at levels, starting with the least horrifying; which is why, I think, Anne Frank’s narrative has become such a universalized understanding of the Holocaust.

But then you move to transit camps, to internment camps, the ghettos, to Auschwitz, to the Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka), to the Einsatzgruppen and Babi Yar Level Shit. And every new level makes the old one look less horrifying by comparison.

In that pattern of learning, it’s perfectly rational to say things like OH PLEASE BELSEN WAS NOTHING because you are a student absorbing traumatic history in the healthiest possible way. Saying something like that, as a student of history, is not a judgement on the experiences of survivors; it’s a commentary on sequential learning.

Historiographically speaking, Holocaust survivors and Holocaust historians often mutually fail to understand each other; to the point where survivors actively dislike historians (although soon this sentence will be entirely in past tense, unfortunately). And I’m pretty sure that, for historians of things that happened within living memory, this is an ongoing concern—language of experience and survival vs. language of learning and understanding. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but I wish we had better language for this chasm.

[hero-israel]

During Nuremberg Trial testimony, the prosecutor pressed Einsatzgruppen commander Otto Ohlendorf: “You were going out to shoot down defenseless people. Now, didn’t the question of the morality of that enter your mind?” Ohlendorf referred to the Allied bombings of Germany as a context:

I am not in a position to isolate this occurrence from the occurrences of 1943, 1944, and 1945 where with my own hands I took children and women out of the burning asphalt myself, and with my own hands I took big blocks of stone from the stomachs of pregnant women; and with my own eyes I saw 60,000 people die within 24 hours.

A judge immediately pointed out that his own killing spree preceded those bombings. But this would become known as the “Dresden defense,” to which Ohlendorf resorted still another time, in this exchange:

Ohlendorf: I have seen very many children killed in this war through air attacks, for the security of other nations, and orders were carried out to bomb, no matter whether many children were killed or not. Q: Now, I think we are getting somewhere, Mr. Ohlendorf. You saw German children killed by Allied bombers and that is what you are referring to? Ohlendorf: Yes, I have seen it. Q: Do you attempt to draw a moral comparison between the bomber who drops bombs hoping that it will not kill children and yourself who shot children deliberately? Is that a fair moral comparison ? Ohlendorf: I cannot imagine that those planes which systematically covered a city that was a fortified city, square meter for square meter, with incendiaries and explosive bombs and again with phosphorus bombs, and this done from block to block, and then as I have seen it in Dresden likewise the squares where the civilian population had fled to—that these men could possibly hope not to kill any civilian population, and no children.

Ohlendorf thought this defense so powerful that he invoked it yet another time:

The fact that individual men killed civilians face to face is looked upon as terrible and is pictured as specially gruesome because the order was clearly given to kill these people; but I cannot morally evaluate a deed any better, a deed which makes it possible, by pushing a button, to kill a much larger number of civilians, men, women, and children.

(The chief prosecutor, an American, called this particular iteration “exactly what a fanatical pseudo-intellectual SS-man might well believe.”)

At Nuremberg, this sort of tu quoque defense (“I shouldn’t be punished because they did it too”) wasn’t admissible. Still, in the verdict of the Einsatzgruppen Trial, the judges chose to refute it. “It was submitted,” the judges wrote, “that the defendants must be exonerated from the charge of killing civilian populations since every Allied nation brought about the death of noncombatants through the instrumentality of bombing.” The judges would have none of it:

A city is bombed for tactical purposes… it inevitably happens that nonmilitary persons are killed. This is an incident, a grave incident to be sure, but an unavoidable corollary of battle action. The civilians are not individualized. The bomb falls, it is aimed at the railroad yards, houses along the tracks are hit and many of their occupants killed. But that is entirely different, both in fact and in law, from an armed force marching up to these same railroad tracks, entering those houses abutting thereon, dragging out the men, women and children and shooting them.

The tribunal sentenced Ohlendorf to death. He was hanged in June 1951.

“In the last analysis”

Nuremberg enforced a fundamental distinction. All civilian lives are equal, but not so all ways of taking them. The deliberate and purposeful killing of civilians is a crime; not so the taking of civilian lives that is undesired, unintended, but unavoidable. The errors made by a bomber squadron cannot be deducted from the murders committed by a death squad. It’s a difference compounded many times over when those civilian men, women, and children are subjected to torture, rape, and mutilation before their murder. To borrow Khalidi’s phrase, “in the last analysis,” this distinction is what separates modern civilization from its predecessors.

More disturbing is the thought that it separates the contemporary West from its peers. Otto Ohlendorf and the regime he served did all they could to conceal their deeds from Western eyes. Nazi Germany still operated in a West founded on Enlightenment values. So massive a violation of a shared patrimony needed to be hidden from view.

In contrast, Hamas initially sought to publicize its deeds, assuming they would win applause, admiration, or at least tacit acceptance in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Here they succeeded beyond their expectations. The many millions who don’t share the West’s patrimony, and who know next to nothing about the Holocaust or Nuremberg, do see things as Khalidi says they see them. (So, too, does a sliver of alienated opinion in the West, where such views are cultivated and celebrated.)

Finally, and still more disturbing, is the fact that Ohlendorf’s defense has been revived to frame the massacre of Jews. 

[free-and-to-none-accountable]

Whenever there's an even vaguely progressive social movement gaining steam in Latin America, the US media will go find a blonde School Of The Americas graduate named something like Josè von Einsatzgruppen to come on American TV and be like "Why won't America save us from the communists"

[er1chartmann]

Reinhard Heydrich timeline

This is Reinhard Heydrich, the man with the Iron Heart, timeline:

1904: He was born in Halle, Germany, on March 7, 1904,

1914: the First World War began

1918: He became a member of the Freikorps.

1918: He became a member of the Anti-Semitic Federation.

1922: He became part of the German Navy (Reichsmarine) at the naval academy in Kiel

1928: He was promoted to lieutenant of the Reichsmarine

1929: He was discharged from the Navy for ''conduct deplorable for a gentleman''

1931: He married Lina Von Osten.

1931: Himmler wanted to create a counter-intelligence unit within the Schutzstaffel (SS). On the advice of a friend, Baron Karl von Eberstein, he made contact with Heydrich, who was then selected for the task and who thus also became part of the Nazi party.

1932: his division was renamed Sicherheitsdienst (SD)

1933: Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany

1933: His first son, Klaus Heydrich, was born. Ernst Rohm was the godfather.

1934: He was placed in command of the Gestapo

1934: His second son, Heider Heydrich, was born.

1936: He visited Rome with Heinrich Himmler.

1939: Himmler placed him in charge of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, which included the SD, Gestapo and the Einsatzgruppen).

1939: His first daughter, Silke Heydrich, was born.

1939: He organized the attack on the Gleiwitz radio station, called "Operation Himmler"

1939: The second world war began.

1940: He became president of Interpol.

1941: He was promoted to Obergruppenfuhrer

1941: He became governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

1942: He held the infamous conference in Wannsee in which the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was planned

1942: He died following an attack by Czechoslovakian partisans.

1942: His second daughter was born shortly after his death.

Sources:

Wikipedia: Reinhard Heydrich

Wikipedia: Lina Heydrich

If you don't like it go with your life

I DON'T SUPPORT NAZISM, FASCISM OR ZIONISM IN ANY WAY, THIS IS AN EDUCATIONAL POST

[tchaikovskaya]

arguing that nazi collaborators on the eastern front (especially ones specifically aligned with the waffen ss who were active in anti-partisan operations!) were not aware of the einsatzgruppen and had nothing to do with their genocidal operations is a form of soft holocaust denial, btw

[mariacallous]

WASHINGTON (JTA) — In the span of two days, one Jewish lawmaker became the first to call on Israel to join a ceasefire, another called the Palestinian death toll “unacceptable” and a third said Israel’s conduct was a “moral failure.’

The 35 Jews in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the Senate — all but two of them Democrats — have been among the most stalwart in defending Israel since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacres launched the war. Last month, three Jewish lawmakers, including two progressives, spearheaded a letter from more than half of House Democrats supporting President Joe Biden’s robust backing for Israel. All 24 Jewish Democrats in the House signed it.

Now — as the war enters its sixth week, the Palestinian death toll rises and the humanitarian crisis intensifies — anguished expressions of dissent from Reps. Becca Balint of Vermont and Dean Phillips of Minnesota, and Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, suggest that wall of support might be crumbling.

Phillips, Ossoff and Balint each said that the massacres Hamas carried out, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 200 captive, recalled the horrors of the Holocaust. “These events call to mind the Einsatzgruppen SS, the Nazi death squads who hunted and massacred our relatives across Eastern Europe 80 years ago,” Ossoff said on the Senate floor.

But they said they have been haunted by the subsequent carnage, in which the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry has said that more than 11,000 Palestinians have died, including thousands of children. It’s not known how many among that number are combatants, and how many among the dead were victims of misfired rockets aimed at Israel.

On Thursday, Balint became the first Jewish member of Congress to endorse a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.

“What is needed right now is an immediate break in violence to allow for a true negotiated ceasefire,” she said in an op-ed for VTigger, a Vermont news site. “One in which both sides stop the bloodshed, allow critical access to humanitarian aid and move towards negotiating a sustainable and lasting peace.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat who is a leader of the “Squad,” the most left-wing faction in the House, immediately seized upon Balint’s support, noting her Jewish identity.

“Rep. Becca Balint is now the first Jewish member of Congress to come out in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “She is incredibly brave, taking a stance rooted in her commitment to human rights and protection of the innocent.”

Balint’s appeal differs in some ways from the ceasefire promotion that Ocasio-Cortez champions, in two substantive ways: Ocasio-Cortez this week spearheaded a letter to Biden urging him to press Israel into a ceasefire. Balint’s appeal was to Israel, and not to Biden to exert pressure on Israel.

Balint also said in her op-ed that a condition of a ceasefire must be the removal of Hamas from power — which is Israel’s objective in the war.

“A lasting bilateral cease-fire can only work if Hamas does not continue to rule in Gaza,” she wrote. “Hamas is a terrorist organization, and its stated goal is to annihilate the state of Israel. It can’t remain in power in Gaza.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s letter, which got 24 signatures, makes no such condition.

Later in the day, Ossoff took to the Senate floor to excoriate Israel’s conduct. He did not call for a ceasefire — he said Israel must pursue Hamas. But he was unstinting in his criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war and its resistance to Biden Administration pleas to allow in humanitarian assistance.

“The extent of civilian death and suffering in Gaza is unnecessary,” he said. “It is a moral failure and it should be unacceptable to the United States.”

Ossoff was especially galled that Israel seemed to be rebuffing Biden administration appeals to allow in relief and to curb violence by a group of Israeli West Bank settlers who have seized the moment to attack Palestinian communities.

“Requests by the United States that the Israeli leadership conduct a more targeted campaign, that they permit and provide a safe passage for aid essential to the sustenance of innocent life, that they clearly define objectives, that they prevent extrajudicial killings by extremists in the West Bank, that they present a credible plan for Gaza’s future governance have mostly been ignored,” Ossoff said.

He raised the specter of conditioning U.S. defense assistance to Israel on its compliance. “I do not accept that the total deprivation of millions of innocent civilians is necessary for Israel to secure its objectives or in the national interest of the United States, and where the United States is committing arms funds and support to those efforts, we must guard our principles and our interests,” he said.

On Friday, Phillips, who is mounting a long-shot primary challenge to Biden and is known for his moderate positions, released a statement outlining his vision for a way out of the war that did not spare Israel or its leadership. He too called on Israel to dismantle Hamas’ fighting capacity.

“Israel has every right and expectation to target Hamas terrorists and dismantle their capability of destroying the state of Israel,” he said. “But that response has taken an unacceptable toll on Palestinians, many of whom are subject to Hamas terror — not supporters of it.”

He took aim in particular at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who he said had “exacerbated” policies of “repression and illegal settlement on Palestinian lands.” He said Israelis should hold elections soon. Netanyahu also has low approval ratings within Israel.

Phillips presented a five-point plan to create a “future of peace.” The document was notable considering Phillips has been a leader in Congress in terms of calling out fellow Democrats for Israel criticism that he believed was antisemitic.

Until now the only Jewish Democrat forcefully criticizing Israel’s response has been Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the unofficial leader of congressional progressives. But he has refused to call for a ceasefire and has distanced himself from fellow progressive who do.

The shifts by Jewish lawmakers comes amid accelerating volleys of sentiment by people in and close to the U.S. government. Hundreds of Biden administration staffers have signed statements criticizing the administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war and calling for Biden to do more to support the Palestinians, the New York Times reported this week.

Also this week, more than 100 former staffers for Barack Obama issued a letter praising Biden’s “moral clarity” for backing Israel and endorsing his request for a $14 billion emergency assistance package to Israel.

[eretzyisrael]

by Andrew Pessin

Four days in, after explicit images of the slaughter had been blasting around the internet nonstop for days, my college administration, and my faculty colleagues, had remained silent. In contrast, when a single Black man died by a police officer far away a few years ago the place had exploded for days. When an administrator more recently scheduled an event at a venue that 40 years earlier had racist admissions policies there were weeks of outrage, the canceling of classes and then of the administrator. The misuse of pronouns here can get you disciplined on a bias charge, in this age of microaggressions and in the name of promoting inclusion.

But when (now) 1400+ Jews are slaughtered in cold blood, live on camera, there is—silence.

And not just slaughtered: bloodthirsty murderers going house to house, murdering entire families, children, grandparents, medics and first responders, raping women and little girls, abusing corpses, burning down houses with their families inside like in medieval times, paragliding into a music festival with automatic weapons gunning down 260 young adults (same age as our students), not to mention taking 200+ hostages (women, children, elderly) whom they have threatened to execute publicly (assuming they are still alive) —no different from the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, except that the Nazis didn’t have the ability to also livestream their atrocities—

There was silence.

Actually worse: business as usual. Chatter about upcoming events, department business, the usual weekly newsletters, announcements re upcoming meetings. Nothing to talk about, folks, it’s just Jews being slaughtered on the largest scale since the Holocaust.

“We must take care of our students”—a wonderful rallying cry that fills up our airwaves whenever any identity group is perceived to have received a harm, however abstract that harm is, however removed that harm might be from them directly and personally.

Except for Jews—whose family members, friends, and acquaintances were literally just gunned down, raped, burned alive, decapitated, all livestreamed. (They used one grandmother’s phone to film their execution of her, then posted the video to her own Facebook account so everyone she knew could witness it—which is how her family learned of her fate.)

[just-antithings]

I'll never forget the time my highschool class went to the Jewish holocaust museum.

One of the historians (idk if they were Jewish) there opened their talk quoting a young woman's description of her father who died in the war. She emphasised how kind and loving, how he was always gentle with her and would attend her ballet classes. He loved his work and loved all people and was by all accounts (the historian included some other quotes from friends and family ect) an incredibly loving father. She goes on to say how his life was cut short by evil monsters, how he had so much more to offer the world and how she will always remember him as her hero.

The historian then revealed that the man was Reinhard Heydrich aka the primary architect for the final solution, right hand man to himmler and had complete control over the Einsatzgruppen (death squads).

The historian then asked us if we thought he was a monster. Of course we all said yes but he challenged us and asked before we knew who the man's name was did we think he was a monster? Would anyone who only saw this side of him think he was a monster? Did Reinhard Heydrich's daughters description fit what we thought a nazi was? Did it fit any particular stereotype of an 'evil' person?

The point was he said that we need to be very careful when describing Nazis as evil monsters. Because that conjures up images of clearly defined traits that everyone can immediately identify (eg hooked nose, black skin ect (his words not mine).

The Nazis were humans. Thinking of them as some other species that are distinct from humanity is very very dangerous because it implies that WE are incapable of committing similar acts or at least creating environments where such acts can happen.

Idk its really really stuck with me over the years.

Antis seem to act like this in terms of pedos if that makes sense?

.