Never Again… NEVER!
USAAF Dogtags and Stalag Luf-1 Dogtags – courtesy of TOW and family
Disclaimer: I am not Jewish.
My family history is mostly Breton, Gallic, Cornish and lowland Scottish. Probably Pictish, too, but that takes some DNA sampling. I might have a tiny bit of Heidelbergensis, too.
But I don’t have to be Jewish to despise and excoriate someone who wanted to slaughter millions because his Jewish mother had breast cancer and the Jewish doctor who treated her could not cure it. There was no cure for it in the early 20th century, but it was the doctor’s fault that she died.
Hitler was able to hone his skills as a pubic speaker and attract the younger crowd, who became his Braunhemden (brown shirts) and Sturmabteilung (Storm Division) when he wanted to get his rampages underway. He gave them free rein to be as destructive as they liked. (What do we see going on now?)
For what it’s worth, Stalin was no better, and ditto Mao Tse-Tung and Uncle Ho. They are all cut from the same cloth. I won’t go into the heinous acts of the Inquisition and the Catholic Church, or Mary Tudor’s rampages in her attempts to restore the Catholic Church’s dominance over England. History is full of such people, who seem to attract the worst kinds of idiots to support them. But my intent here is only to remind us all that what we take for granted on a day-to-day basis can easily be swept away from us if we don’t pay attention, even for a short while.
Fair warning: Some of this stuff is quite graphic.
Liberation of Dachau concentration camp by US troops – includes German footage shot before US troops arrived. Narrator: Mark Felton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRk2FZbsMxw
The History dot com article below references the 29 April 1945 camp liberation. The photos were shot by US Army photographers.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/dachau-liberated
Some of this stuff is quite graphic, as I said. The following comes from the liberation of Buchenwald. On April 11th 1945, the 6th Armoured Division of the US army liberated Buchenwald concentration camp, making its inmates the first on German soil to be freed from the grip of the Nazis. By the end of the war, Buchenwald and its surrounding sub-camps made up the largest camp in Germany.
For anyone who still thinks it never happened, there was a girl in my company at RTC who swore it was all fiction because her grandmother, a German native who emigrated after World War II to America, had never heard anything about it. Some of the villages were within a mile of the camps and the residents had no idea that such horrendous things as mass murders and horrible medical experiments on human beings were going on. There are plenty of eyewitness accounts by those who were prisoners and those who liberated the camps and describe the sight of people who had shrunk to skeletal proportions but were still alive, and the foul odors of rotting flesh and decay coming from them.
It was not just Jewish people who were sent to death camps. It was anyone who was afflicted with mental disorders or incurable diseases, or some unapproved ethnic group like gypsies. There was a list of “undesirable” disorders such as polio or epilepsy; just get rid of them.
None of it ever appeared in the contemporary newspapers or other print media, nor was any of it broadcast on the radio.
Guess who controlled the newspapers and other media?
Come on, just take a guess.
And then ask yourself what is going on here and now.
Category: Army, Historical, War Stories
“…what we take for granted on a day-to-day basis can easily be swept away from us if we don’t pay attention, even for a short while.”
Seems appropriate to place this quote here.
“Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again.”
Ronald Reagan
In contemporary terminology….
The Nazis were rife with Stolen Valor phony Aryans.
True about Hitler’s mother having cancer, BUT, he did allow Dr. Bloch to leave Austria and he immigrated to Canada and died in 1945…
We too are not Jewish but my grandparents hid a Jewish baby, papa was in the underground, friends and family executed and several died.
Would’ve been better if Hitler died of cancer instead of his mother.
Had my papa not suffered through the insanity I wouldn’t be in America today…
God Bless all who were murdered…
We have moved from what Germany was like in the early to mid 1930’s to a bit later in the 1930’s. We have government officials deliberately moving elderly people into close quarters with those sick with the ‘rona virus, recommendations that everybody mask up all the time in spite of real evidence that this practice can cause illness and death in a significant percentage of the population, and assorted other lies and half-truths about this illness. The destruction of our economy is either a welcome side effect or an actual goal of those who demand hysteria instead of a rational response to a disease.
What is going on now in this country is being spearheaded by evil people. Those who would foist so may unproven “treatments” upon us can be nothing less than evil.
Who decided, for instance, that incentivizing overreporting of these cases was a good idea?
Yes. Evil doers are among us.
The Stalag Luft 1 tags belonged to my bride’s uncle. A B-29 navigator, he did 35 bombing missions over Germany. He spent 15 months in Stalag Luft 1 before being liberated by allied forces. Sadly, he committed suicide one year after coming home, probably due to a failed marriage. Upon hearing the news, my bride’s grandfather had a heart attack. My father-in-law had to deal with both deaths and never spoke about his brother. We have other relics and pictures of TJ Thompson.
TOW’s a good man, but I desire credit where deserved.
Sorry about that.
Perhaps update it?
I provided the pictures of B-17s in Europe, sourced from the internet, with whatever info I could find on each of them. Not sure why the dog tags were misattributed to me. Sorry about that.
I wish I could track down Great-Uncle Ollie’s photo album from the war. He had dozens of pictures from his time in the 97th Bombardment Group (Heavy), including B-17s he wrenched on in Britain and North Africa.
A retired NYPD PO whom came to work with us after he put in his twenty but actually left because of the Knapp commision hearings had a brother that liberated one of the concentration camps and he told me that his brother and other members went through the buildings and just shot any guards that they saw if they were armed or surrendering. Cameramen turned off the cameras before the guards were shot. Imagine today if this were the same thing, the demoRAT liberals would be asking for the Soldiers to be jailed. Another guy I worked for was an engineer and he told me that he bulldozed the remains into large ditches. When I started in 1970, most of the old timers were WW2 Vets. Best story was when I was driving a former Guadacanal Marine, he tells me that the replacements were green and a couple of them threw grenades at the Japs without pulling the pin and the grenades came back with the pins pulled.
Great-Uncle Jim helped liberate one of the camps. He was reasonably forthcoming about most of his time overseas, including combat, but that camp was the one subject that was not to be discussed, ever.
I.m not Jewish either, but my FIRST Wife’s Mother’s people were. I have related some of what I knew of their experiences in WWII here before. I have strongly encouraged my daughter to record any and everything she can from her Grandmother before it is too late. I have had very little success in some of the other family members from doing the same. The Grandmother is the last surviving member of that generation, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, and when she is gone, that History is gone.
Thanks for this post M’Lady and the added linkys. Thanks to aGrimm for sending his family artifacts to be shared. Imma sharing this post with my Baby Girl for her to share with her Mom’s Family. Maybe it will light some fires under some azzes.
Not teaching this history in schools is one way that the Marxists can help make history repeat itself.
That’s why I’m constantly bugging my wife to teach the kids to speak Khmer. Their grandparents (barely) lived through the Cambodian Genocide. The kids should hear firsthand what socialism wrought in the old country, and why America was and is the Promised Land.
The Grandmother was full of the stinky brown stuff, or intentionally kept in the dark. There are a lot of translated conversations, documents and journals going as far as to joke about sending misbehaving kids to the Concentration camps. A lot of them were looking the other way.
Ah the fun things you’ll find when you’re on furlough.
Really though. The saddest thing is that you can see it happening again. Saw a thread on the cesspit that is Twitter about the Chinese concentration/re-education camps and all of the people responding rotated between “Don’t care” and “Well you didn’t care when X happened”. It’s what happens when you dilute the history down too much.
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-a-million-people-are-jailed-at-china-s-gulags-i-escaped-here-s-what-goes-on-inside-1.7994216
It’s going on in China now.
“Some of the villages were within a mile of the camps and the residents had no idea that such horrendous things as mass murders and horrible medical experiments on human beings were going on.”
To use a word I heard in a WWII movie, “Bushwa”.
Germans were willfully ignorant. They “didn’t know” because they chose to ignore it. They had already seen Hitler’s mandatory euthanasia program for kids born with disabilities—there were actually public protests against it—as well as nazi repression of any churches that didn’t adopt the anti-scriptural doctrine pushed by the nazi party (ironically titled “positive Christianity” by the goose-steppers). They knew that stepping out of line was inviting a late-night visit from the gestapo. They knew that the SS and Hitler Youth were teaching kids that it was their “aryan duty“ to exterminate the untermensch. They just wanted it all to be “out of sight, out of mind.”
Ironically, it was German military personnel who were the least likely to be in a position to see the signs, depending on where they were deployed, as they might not be in a position to see what was going on at home for extended periods. Luftwaffe guys and U-boat crews were generally unlikely to encounter any einsatzgruppen. Heer troops in France would most likely only see local Jews rounded up and sent elsewhere. On the Eastern Front, not so much; war crimes there were a pretty common occurrence, not that the Red Army was any better.
It’s really scary how Hitler got the entire country to go along with his evil insanity, through various means.
The use of the schools to train children to hate large swaths of society is perhaps the most chilling aspect of what is going on now in this country. It looks entirely too similar to Nazi Germany in the 30’s.
And we are paying for it with no option otherwise….
For what it’s worth, outside of Spain (where it had more to do with national politics), the Inquisition’s primary role was preventing hysteria over accusations of witchcraft. The Church’s official position was that witchcraft is fake, therefore any alleged witches were either con artists or falsely accused. And for all her “Bloody Mary” reputation, Mary Tudor’s body count in her attempt to restore Catholicism to England was significantly smaller than the number of people tortured and killed in Elizabeth I’s campaign to purge England of Catholics. The Church has some unpleasant history, but some of it has been exaggerated or fabricated. Early Protestants made up all kinds of stories to vilify the Church that went unchallenged for centuries. Even Rodrigo Borgia’s allegedly hideous resumé is not really supported by history, for the most part. For every Tomas De Torquemada, there’s been a Maximilian Kolbe or a Damien De Veuster.
Your overall point still stands, nonetheless.
Advice I once received:
“Don’t wait until you notice the showerheads hissing before you decide to resist.”
From one who managed to avoid that epiphany directly.
My Dad was one who liberated Dachau. The cameras were rolling at one end of the camp while some intense resistance from the SS guards was going on at the other end.
Same here with my dad but maybe a different camp. He said Eisenhower walked through. They made the local townspeople walk through it. He also said they didn’t take any prisoners.