Mike Pence pays tribute to Holocaust victims in visit to Auschwitz camp in Poland
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence joined Polish President Andrzej Duda Friday in a visit to the infamous Auschwitz death camp to pay tribute to Holocaust victims.
An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945 where they faced starvation, brutal forced labor and execution. The German Gestapo sent people to the camp who were suspected of clandestine activities against the Nazi party. Only about 200,000 survived.
It seems unimaginable that people could murder the innocent as a matter of daily routine. How does such a thing come to pass? There are those who would re-write history to depict the Holocaust as nothing more than a hoax. We have a responsibility to ensure the loss of so many endures the ages as insurance that this kind of evil can never thrive again.
I hope you can find ten minutes to watch the following video. As the grandson of Hungarians that fled to this country… I can only sit and shake my head in disbelief.
Source: Mike Pence pays tribute to Holocaust victims in visit to Auschwitz camp in Poland
Category: Historical, Politics
PBS ran a series on Death Camp workers…the photos of people smiling, drinking, eating picnic lunches against a backdrop of starvation and death should be unsettling to us all.
My Polish uncle knows all too well that real monsters don’t look at all like monsters, they look like “Good Germans” but you’re still as dead as if they were the monsters of our imaginations.
As best as we have been able to determine the Polish side of our family no longer exists. My aunt went to the historic family region and no one knew anything about them.
“How does such a thing come to pass?”
The people who do it just do not care. It goes beyond lacking a conscience. They just do not care or see others as human beings.
Stalin’s death total is somewhere between 17 million and 20 million, much of it through forced deportation to gulags.
Mao’s total includes executions of 1.5 million deaths during the Cultural Revolution, another million for the other campaigns, and between 35 million and 45 million for the Great Leap Famine. Taking a middle number for the famine, 40 million, that’s about 42.5 million deaths.
Pol Pot: 2+ million of dead Cambodians.
It is because human lives meant nothing to them. They just did not care.
The list of genocide could not be complete without the mention of the 65 million dead babies since the decision of Roe v. Wade.
There is no reason for abortion these days, the methods of birth control are everywhere and many of them are free.
I am sure that many here disagree on this statement, but to me life is precious, more precious than anything else.
I have two beautiful daughters because my girlfriends at the time either were pro-life or too damn drunk to go through with an abortion and were walked out of the abortion clinic by myself.
So I tell people that I am pro-life and I can prove it…
Twice…
And I couldn’t be happier with the outcome of that stance !!!
See my post over on the WOT.
I stand firmly with you Thunderstixx. Going over to the post on WOT.
He should visit Karyn Forest next, and acknowledge Stalin’s massacre of Poles there.
Watch the Russians spazz over that.
Gah auto corrupt
-Katyn- Forest
Ask kids today (I know, that’s a loaded statement in itself…) about the concentration camps, and the atrocities of Nazi Germany.
Prepare for blank looks.
Just my opinion…
Katyn Forest. Stalin should roast in hell for an eternity.
Mark,
Did a quick check on Katyn.
I guess I need to get the blank look off my own face and learn as well.
Thank you. Sir.
For anyone else interested, some details of the executions at Kaytn are described here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre#Executions
One item of note: the NKVD’s chief executioner, Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin, reporedly personally executed some 7,000 individuals during then Kaytn massacres over a 28 day period – or around 250 per day for four weeks straight.
In one of history’s ironic twists, the weapon of choice for the executions was the Walther .25 ACP semi-automatic pistol. Apparently the recoil from the standard Russian Nagant M1895 revolver (which was used for some executions) was such that it became painful for the executioner.
Burn in hell, Beria (who proposed the massacres) and Stalin (who approved them). Given Stalin’s grip on power in the USSR at the time, the Soviet Politburo’s approval was likely nothing more than a formality.
Thank you, Hondo.
I’m sure it was the trigger pull and not the recoil than became painful. 7.62x38R is a pretty wimpy cartridge.(I have shot lots of commie surplus)
The Nagant requires a heavy trigger pull(heavy even for a Chimp!) achieve the gas seal that boosts MV and also allows it to be used with a silencer.
“It seems unimaginable that people could murder the innocent as a matter of daily routine.”
Not to take away from the horrors of the Holocaust or the atrocities of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, but IMHO and mine only, our country sadly takes away innocent lives everyday.
God bless our Vice President. He attended the 2019 March for Life Rally and addressed the 37th Annual Rose Dinner.
AnotherPat, thanks for pointing that out. If you are referring to what I think you are, it’s worth a thread of its own. Is the count somewhere around 60 million now since that infamous ?v? ruling? I have very strong objections to that practice….Grrrrrr
My senior year high school sweetheart became what would ultimately be ex-wife # 1. She was also the Mother of my daughter. Ex-wife’s Mother as a teenager and her Mother were at one point in time prisoners at Dachau. They both still had their numbers tattooed on their arms. They were French/Moroccan Jews. Somehow or another the Father paid a ransom or bribe and got those two out just before they were to transfered to Poland. They were somehow able to get smuggled thru France and Spain and made it to Casablanca in the early ’40s. The oldest son was with the French Underground. The three of them were the only surviving members of a 20 + Family to survive. Ex FnL was a WWII Navy Vet and met ex MnL there after the war, they married and started begetting. He xferred to Air Force and retired in ’69 as a CMS E-9, 3 war serving in country Vet.
Ex wife and I tried 4 different times while in FRG to get to Dachau. Each time something came up that prevented the trip. It was as if the Spirits were not going to allow us to go back. The most heart rendering statement made in the video posted was when the survivor said the people going into the showers were calling out to everyone….”Remember us..Remember us.”
5th/77th FA:
You are correct on what I commented…😊
I know there are different viewpoints and perspectives..I just agree with our Vice President’s belief on this and I commend him for participating in the March For Life.
Thank you for sharing your story about your family members and the Holocaust. I watched the video as well and what hit me was when the survivor pointed out when folks inquired her if getting a numerical tattoo hurt, that she said it was the least of their worries.
Sadly, genocide will never stop. It happened before the Holocast…and as Ex-PH2 pointed out, afterwards. And as Ex said, some people do not care.
If you had relatives that were “tattooed” with concentration camp numbers, they did not get them at Dachau. Dachau was a labor camp, no one was tattooed there. My children, like all school children in Bavaria today, were compelled to make a trip to Dachau, and I had to “un-learn” them of many of the myths that they had been indoctrinated with through public “education” regarding that camp and others. Dachau was not a vacation by any means, but no “mass killings” were conducted there; most of the inmates who died there died of typhus in the final weeks of the war. It was the site of medical experiments and shootings of some (mostly Soviet) prisoners of war; others died of various sicknesses. I had an uncle who had volunteered for the Waffen SS at seventeen years of age, and he was incarcerated there by the Americans after the war. Needless to say, conditions were much better then.
Not disputing your wealth of knowledge SEAL TWO. Some of the records/memories may be murky. I do know this. I have seen with my eyes an ID Card that MnL had from Dachau and the #s on her arm. This was years ago. She would never wear short sleeves, even in the heat of a GA Summer. They may have been transferred to another Camp, numbered, and then somehow got away. Ex Wife never paid a lot of attention (she regrets that now). The only way I had found out was when I took my pen and wrote a phone # on the palm of my hand in MnL’s presence. She went nuts. When I asked her why was there a problem, it took her awhile, but she told me part of the story. Some of the rest I pieced together later from her older brother. So many stories, details, and other folks family history from that time frame has completely disappeared and is forever lost to history. From some of my earlier studies,the Soviets tried to blame Katyn Forest on the Germans.
One of my most prized possessions is a copy of the AAR from the commander of US forces that liberated Dachau. Probably the toughest read ever. Got it at the Holocaust Museum.
For those who can’t get to the museum, some time at their website is entirely worthwhile. And they have a lot of resources available online. Been to a lot of museums around the world, but the Holocaust Museum in WDC is the finest in every way.
https://www.ushmm.org/
My grandfather was held there. He was a Polish cavalry officer when the Germans invaded. After Poland fell, he joined the army resistance. This was an organization put together by the army officers to resist the Germans in a systemic way rather than piecemeal. He was captured and sent to Auschwitz. The Germans sent the most undesirable prisoners there in addition to Jews.
CavScoutCoastie, I’d be interested in hearing “the rest of the story.” Tanks for sharing.
Hey to all those so called socialist/Marxist/ communist this what you have done over 400 Million Murdered in the Name of Utopia and another 60 million murdered in The USA Also.
Thanks to all of for your gentle brickloding wealth of information.
Let it fall. Some of us need to learn more.
Disregard last transmission, I need to learn more,over;
Both Stalin and Hitler were criminals who headed criminal governments. Stalin got a higher tally of victims probably only because he ruled for longer (1924 to 1953 as opposed to 1933 to 1945). Hitler had probably become dehumanized in the First World War. If you see violent death on an industrialized scale more or less every other day, you probably don’t emerge from that as quite ‘normal,’ whatever that means. That doesn’t excuse what he did, it’s just one of the reasons he became what he was. He’d been ‘Out since ’14,’ as they said back then, so he’d seen a lot. He’d also got it into his head that he was doing God’s work by ridding Germany of Jews, and if that meant murdering them, so what? The end justifies the means (which was one of Stalin’s favourite sayings too). In this context Martin Luther could be mentioned also, look up his pamphlet ‘On the Jews and their Lies,’ if you’ve a mind to. It reads remarkably like the worst of Julius Streicher’s rantings, as does ‘On the Shemhamphorash.’ On top of that the Hitler wanted to rearm Germany and that would take money. It was also largely illegal (the Versailles Treaty) which added to the costs as he had to do many things by subterfuge. If he didn’t want to bankrupt the economy, stolen money would come in very useful. Around 1938 after the annexation of Austria, Hitler passed a law forcing Jews to register their property and other assets, and if any Jew wished to emigrate (assuming they could find a country willing to take them) the German government took virtually everything they had first. All in all the Nazis probably looted around 7 billion Reichsmarks worth by this alone, and that’s before the war even started. But one of the biggest tricks Hitler used was deliberately not issuing written orders when it came to things like the Holocaust. Instead, there was a policy, encouraged by him, of “Working toward the Fuhrer.” In other words, if he dropped a hint about this or that and you wanted… Read more »
As for Stalin, he’d been an armed robber for the Bolsheviks, although he didn’t serve in World War One. He was a thoroughly ruthless man with a heart of stone, as revealed by two recollections of his daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva (known as Lana Peters after she defected to the US.)
In the first, while he was going through a list of men ‘convicted’ on trumped up charges, all he said as he read out each name was, ‘To be shot.’
An appalled aide reminded him several of these men had been with him in the Revolution and the Civil War. The aide then asked him if he knew what ‘gratitude,’ meant.
His reply was, ‘I know what gratitude is. It is a disease suffered by dogs!” The aide wisely remained silent thereafter, although it probably did him no good; Stalin had no time for men he thought were too soft or sentimental.
On another occasion, when he was informed his son Yakov had attempted suicide with a pistol and failed, all he said was, “What a useless b..tard … can’t even shoot straight!”
After Yakov had been captured in the Second World War, Stalin’s only response was, “I have no son called Yakov.”
If that’s the kind of man he was, he was probably easily capable of mass murder, I would think. Yet today many Russians still think of him as some sort of hero.
There is little separating Commies and Nazis. They firmly believe in exterminating anyone who either disagrees with them or that they viewed as a threat. Bad mouth the Fuhrer and you go to a concentration camp; bad mouth Stalin or the Party and you go to the Gulag. Hell, Stalin’s minions used to be given quotas of how many people to send to their doom. Many people loyal to this heinous system were sent to their deaths. The same was the case in China.
All to much of that war as well as the one before it will never be known. Having been born into two large much older family’s, I never did know all that served in either among them as we were taught early as to who we were never to ask questions from as they had buried the memories deep inside and chose to live life such as they had and made after the wars. This also applies to everything that has transpired since in ones I know or have met. Just going through dim and present memories of that I have of the past, from WWI to present. One was victim of mustard gas, a couple did their best to keep a tattoo hidden, one was left behind in the Army advance as KIA among the bodies of others that were KIA, only to be discovered as alive by recovery teams, one woman was brutally raped by a German soldier. Were some in front lines who most likely seen the death camps for the first time by outsiders, and another who seen them later after they were liberated. I later met a man who was still in uniform who was in the Bataan Death March, and one who was a Korean POW, served with another who I never met that was VN POW and was awarded MOH, have met 2 tunnel rats. buried 4 KIA and 1 MIA from school in VN and now have seen quite a few others since who served there cross over. The combined families I was born into has served in the Army, Navy, USAAF, National Guard and the USAF and has had both Enlisted and Officers, serving on ground, in the air and at sea and been in many countries and all since the late 1800’s when both sides immigrated to the USA.
Its a very powerful place.
Good on Pence for showing respect.
I am always amazed that so many Jewish people here in the U.S. are anti gun.
If on average, every Jew had shot 2 Nazis, there would be 12 million dead Nazis.
Nice thought, but most sheep move of their own accord to the slaughter.