Holocaust memorial day, Monday the 27th January

I've deleted Paull's comment and I'm going to lock this thread. If any of you would like it reopened, please email me at community.manager@nas.org.uk. I'm not up for having a Holocaust debate on our forum, it really isn't the place for it. 

Your views are Fascist Paul!. Such irony. Hitler would have come out with the same rabid anti-semitic views as you. You would be quite at home in the BNP, another Fascist organisation, but most people would find your views here disgusting.

Paull - debate is one thing, but holocaust denial and accusing "the Jews of starting the fight" isn't acceptable in this community. 

And perhaps you'd like to look at this website Paull, if you want some evidence:

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007271

You are forgetting that the *** documented their own atrocities meticulously, here is a quote from the above link:

"In addition to official photography and films produced at the behest of the Nazi state, German soldiers and police took numerous photographs and film footage of German operations against Jews and other civilians. They documented the public humiliation of Jews, their deportation, mass murder, and confinement in concentration camps. This became powerful visual evidence of Nazi war crimes submitted at Nuremberg. For example, Allied prosecutors submitted the so-called “Stroop Report,” which included as an appendix an album of photographs taken on the orders of SS and Police Leader Jürgen Stroop to document his destruction of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in spring 1943. According to Stroop's own calculations, his forces captured more than 55,000 Jews and of these, killed at least 7,000 and sent 7,000 more to the Treblinka killing center.

Three key perpetrators gave evidence directly related to the Holocaust: Hermann Göring, the highest official of the Nazi state tried at Nuremberg, testified openly and frankly about the persecution of German Jews from the rise of the Nazi party to power in 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939; Otto Ohlendorf testified directly about his unit, Einsatzgruppe D, killing 90,000 Jews in the southern Ukraine in 1941; and the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, testified frankly about the gassing of more than a million Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center during the war. All three claimed that they carried out the legitimate orders of the state."

There were of course survivors who were able to tell horror stories of what they experienced and saw, as well as independent evidence.  You have a very skewed perception of events and there is evidence as to the numbers of innocent people tortured and murdered.  That's not war and it's not about gangs clashing, it's abduction, persecution/torture, enforced slave labour and murder.  There is no way you can word that to be war.

I take it then Paull you will not be attending any Holocaust Memorial Events. It isn't compulsory. I myself cannot find a local event - seems where I am living now doesn't hold any.

Only point I would make, and continue to make, the holocaust happened, as with many such incidents, at the time of a war, it wasn't part of the war. It had been their intention to do this before war started, and they carried on the process regardless, with the battlefronts hundreds of miles away. The allies arrive at the camps after the deed had been done.

It is widely reported that death hangs in the air in these places, as if it can never be cleansed away. Thousands of all nationalities have made the pilgrimage, and indeed groups of British politicians went there this year.

If it makes you feel better you can claim the stockpiles of shoes, false teeth, old suitcases etc are all a sham, if it gives you any satisfaction. But someonhow nothing gets rid of the sense of death concentrated in one place, even seventy years on.

If I may quote Martin Niemoller, a protestant pastor who spent seven years in german concentrations camps because he was an outspoken critic of the ***. He was imprisoned before the war started, as were already many jews.

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out.-- Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out. --- Because I was not a Trade Unionist

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out.. -- Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me. -- and there was no-one left to speak for me".

Say what you like Paull. But some at least will see the importance of remembering.

Where there is war there will always be 'war crimes', you can't expect two gangs to clash on the street and have a gentlemans punch up.

Innocent people are not the enemy, the enemy is the government and policitians who make war.

How you can call killing people in ovens war is beyond me.

Like I said, in war it's the winners who write history, however if you look closely enough you will find a huge sway of people disputing the current version of history based on their research, findings and facts, I am not talking about a handful of bigots, anti-semites or nazi sympathisers, I am talking about many professors, historians and researchers many of which have no political agenda and just merely want to get to the truth.

There is no difference between what the Germans did and what the allies did in bombing Japan with nuclear weapons, they are both either war crimes or both not war crimes, but as you can see clearly history presents the Germans actions as 'war crimes' while the allies actions are seens as heroic.

War means to kill the enemy, you can't complain if the enemy starts doing things others consider as unfair by labelling them as 'war crimes', it's like having a fight and saying you can't pull hair or bite, but once the fight is in full swing the rule book goes out the window because the only thing in your mind is to defeat your opponent. If one person in a fight bites and the other pulls hair they have both broken the rules.

Try to think about the Holocaust as reminding us of all forms of genocide and political scapegoating, and don't get too bogged down in a very messy debate just about the jewish suffering.

Inevitably 70 years on it is easy to engage in detached debates about what did or didn't happen. The *** didn't just persecute and anihilate jews. They did the same to Romanies and Gypsies, homosexuals, AND many disabled, including the mentally ill.

And the way they did it, with Germanic efficiency, was to displace people from their homes into ghettoes and camps, and finally transport them to special camps where they were disposed of systemmatically using incinerators and gas chambers.

That's not war - even if you want to push up the question of whether the jews started it by challenging Germany on financial and economic grounds. War should not involve the killing of defenceless civilians, but should be between the armed combattants - but inevitably collateral damage to non-combattants is a fact of war. Dresden and Coventry, Hiroshima and Pearl Harbour all consequences of prolonged and destructive war and war strategies.

But what happened in the Holocaust, and in mass genocides before and since, was extermination of races, indiscriminant of whether they were combattants or not. Please don't call it war when people are shipped hundreds of thousands a week to extermination camps, for mass disposal.

It really is banale to label that "war".

I think Paull, you have entirely missed the point.  This is NOT about numbers.  Could have been 600, or 6,000 and the message would be the same.

Yes, war is war, but not all is fair in love and war.  Troops shooting at one another across a battle field etc. is very different from kidnapping and dehumanising/torturing innocent people before burning them alive in ovens.

Oh god, I feel a heated debate coming on...You know me, I'm not one to court controversy ...but it's like a hulk metamorphosis...future note to anyone "Don't mention the war !"

I often see that statement that "6 million jews died in the holocaust", but if this is true then then why are there soooo many historians who are adamant that 6 million is an enormous exaggerration and why when they challenge those figures do they get ostracised.

War is a dirty business, and I would not believe everything you read or are told, because it's political and it's in the best interests of politics to hide or distort the facts. In war it's the winners who get the opportunity to present history as they see fit, if Germany had won the war we would have an entirely different version.

In war people die, after the war the losers are historically made out to be evil, but what about the 'allies' war crimes - should it not be considered a war crime to drop an atomic bomb on civilians, what about the 200,000+ killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and many other war crimes documented that were commited by the allies, if Germany had won the war then the allies would have all this hanging over their head in the same way that we hang this albatross around the neck of the Germans.

War exists because men must fight for what they believe in, but 100 men who believe in what is right can easily be defeated by 1000 men who believe in what is wrong.

Everyone now believes that Adolf Hitler is some kind of anti-Christ, a murderer and a warmonger, but funnily enough many other historical figures with exactly the same agenda but who won their wars, the same people see as heroes.

While I sympathise with anyone who has suffered the horrors of war, to make an event using unproven numbers is wrong, to gather sympathy through this is wrong and to play the victim is wrong.

There was a war, one side won, one side lost.

[Editted by mod]

Can I endorse Hope's alert to this event.

When they were first set up I attended them regularly, as I was chairing an equality group, but I've missed out the last few years being in transition between homes, and out of the loop. I've read aloud texts at some, as a participant.

There should be ceremonies in most towns, on university campuses etc.

It isn't just about what happened then, but what has happened since - genocide and other cruelties world-wide, and abuses nearer home. And it is also about safeguarding the future. 

You don't therefore have to be Jewish to attend, although jewish communities are particularly supportive, and the larger formal ones include elements of the Jewish memorial. Which is hugely emotive.

Often these are accompanied by small exhibitions of photos and memories, not only of the holocaust, but events since.

And it does include the disabled. And, while the impacts on the disabled under our coalition government's cynical and callous welfare reforms taking 500,000 disabled people off benefits, without adequate impact monitoring, might be deemed relatively minor, this may be a time for disabled people to attend holocaust events, to be seen with regard to what could happen.