Picture of German Soldiers reaction to concentration camp movie

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**Relapse**

I got a bit chocked looking at all the guys hiding their faces. Putting myself in the moment when some of these guys saw for the first time what they were fighting for is fairly chilling.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/11/photo_german_soldiers_react_to_concentration_camp_footage.html?wpisrc=obnetwork

If that isn't something to warn us about blindly following some of our own leaders, not a lot else will serve.

**d-usa**

As always I will give my usual recommendation for a great book that is related to the subject:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0465085725/ref=redir_mdp_mobile

It took me a while to finish it, there were periods where I had to read another book for a while to rest my brain. But it is a very worthwhile read.

**PrehistoricUFO**

I'm very well-read on the subject of the darkest period in human history. Books like Shlomo Venezia's 'Inside the Gas Chambers' and Ilya Ehrenburg's and Vasily Grossman's 'Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry' will turn your world upside down. They are shocking, and it really is a wonder how the Shoah was allowed to occur.

Anyway, I'm willing to bet a lot of the footage they saw was from 'Memory of the Camps', and similar collections of KZ footage. Actually, most of the KZ footage can be found on YouTube, but be warned that the films are not for the feint of heart, obviously. 'Memory of the Camps' actually has real footage of Germans being toured through the camps on a forced tour by the liberating Americans. Most of them are shocked and appalled, seeing their faces in a photo like this is one thing, but watching their reactions on video is a totally different thing. The NSDAP bred monsters, but a lot of Germany just didn't know the real horror of it.

**Kovnik Obama**

PrehistoricUFO wrote:
The NSDAP bred monsters, but a lot of Germany just didn't know the real horror of it.

The Nazi government realized that they couldn't afford the same backlash as they had with Aktion T4. Hitler himself said that they should've waited until the war was started to implement Aktion's policy.

As it was, the Catholic Church organized protests against the eugenic policies and actually got the few facilities to 'officially' close down.

**Medium of Death**

I tried watching the movie they were shown on youtube, it's all in German though. A subtitled version would be handy if anybody knows of it.

**Captain Fantastic**

The atrocities these men have seen with their own eyes probably make the pictures even worse. How would it feel? To know you fought for nothing, and lost?

These are POWs. Men who have likely seen their brothers cut in half with machine guns, blown into pieces, and dismembered beyond recognition. Experiences like that probably left these men screaming in the middle of the night for the rest of their lives.

Inspiring picture, OP.

**SoloFalcon1138**

Not only are these guys POWs of (most-likely) combat troops, but remember, most Germans had no idea this was going on. That is why so many Holocaust deniers were German vets. People didn't realize the Final Solution was happening, when they may have had a clue, most figured it was segregation, not slave.labor and execution.

**d-usa**

While a decent number knew what was actually going on, many knew the rumors. But the rumors, while true, were so outlandish that most people who have heard them didn't believe them.

**Relapse**

Captain Fantastic wrote:
The atrocities these men have seen with their own eyes probably make the pictures even worse. How would it feel? To know you fought for nothing, and lost?

These are POWs. Men who have likely seen their brothers cut in half with machine guns, blown into pieces, and dismembered beyond recognition. Experiences like that probably left these men screaming in the middle of the night for the rest of their lives.

Inspiring picture, OP.

The thing that really sets off what you say is the fact after all they have gone through that you mention, that some of the soldiers appear to be crying at what they are seeing while others can't seem to bring themselves to look. Their thought process at that moment in time must have been soul crushing.
It's also interesting to me that there appear to be a lot of medics in the crowd.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

d-usa wrote:
While a decent number knew what was actually going on, many knew the rumors. But the rumors, while true, were so outlandish that most people who have heard them didn't believe them.

A good example of this nowadays are the differences in opinion about drone strikes. What's really true and what's hyperbole?

**Soo'Vah'Cha**

Relapse wrote:
Captain Fantastic wrote:
The atrocities these men have seen with their own eyes probably make the pictures even worse. How would it feel? To know you fought for nothing, and lost?

These are POWs. Men who have likely seen their brothers cut in half with machine guns, blown into pieces, and dismembered beyond recognition. Experiences like that probably left these men screaming in the middle of the night for the rest of their lives.

Inspiring picture, OP.

The thing that really sets off what you say is the fact after all they have gone through that you mention, that some of the soldiers appear to be crying at what they are seeing while others can't seem to bring themselves to look. Their thought process at that moment in time must have been soul crushing.
It's also interesting to me that there appear to be a lot of medics in the crowd.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

d-usa wrote:
While a decent number knew what was actually going on, many knew the rumors. But the rumors, while true, were so outlandish that most people who have heard them didn't believe them.

A good example of this nowadays are the differences in opinion about drone strikes. What's really true and what's hyperbole?

A large number of captured medics, could be due to the practice in ww2 not to shoot medics, regardless of nationality, and many would be captured tending to their own wounded.

And as to the pic the facial expressions are telling, most are in shock/ horror , and some seem to just stare blankly. Its quite a photo.

**Dakkamite**

Great pic man. As much as I try not to, its easy to forget that all but the most evil SS melon-fethers were people too.

Also cheers to d-usa for the book recommendation. Its at my uni library so I'm gonna go check it out...

**d-usa**

Dakkamite wrote:
Great pic man. As much as I try not to, its easy to forget that all but the most evil SS melon-fethers were people too.

Also cheers to d-usa for the book recommendation. Its at my uni library so I'm gonna go check it out...

Like I said, it's a good (but hard) read. But keep in mind that it is somewhat of a scholarly approach to the subject and at times it reads like a research paper, especially the second half.

The first half of the book are basically transcripts from oral interviews with people from all backgrounds that were alive during the time, so it is a great resource for an oral history of what it was like to live in that time. The second half goes through the analysis of the responses, the interviews, the research, making sense of the data, etc. In the end the researchers found that between 40-50% of Germans knew or suspected about some level of mass murder, but of that group approximately 60% of Germans didn't believe some or all of the reports. People reported that they did watch the SS and SA round up the Jews in their cities and march them to the train station, but they didn't think that they were all being shipped off to be murdered. The SS let them carry suitcases and backpacks, and why would you let them take their belongings with them if you are just going to kill them anyway?

The interviews are the hard part of the book. There are a variety of them, from Jews that left before the holocaust started to Jews that survived it. And from ordinary Germans that didn't know anything about the Holocaust to Germans who witnessed it. A quick example from the book:

Adam Grolsch wrote:
And then one morning, after I hadn't been there for more than five or six days, there was a huge racket going on outside and I said to myself, "Man, what's going on here?"Otherwise it had been very quiet there where I had been living in the town in an old church where we had our quarters. And Pinsk had a ghetto, a Jewish ghetto with around 25,000 inhabitants.
...
In short, I then set out with a friend, and with my own eyes saw how the people there were slaughtered; in two days, 25,000 men, women, and children, and in the most beastly way. I saw how they had to undress in front of the tank traps and many other things. And the absolute worst thing I saw was how this man took a screaming baby and beat it headfirst against a wall until it was dead.
...
And then they saw me standing there with another guy [guy who was with me] -- both us were wearing uniforms -- and then a number of them suddenly came up and grabbed us and took us under arrest. And then standing just near to us was the local commandant, who was an officer and the local commandant for the city of Pinsk. He suddenly saw us there as well, and, in short, if he hadn't been there, we also would have ended up in the pit because that was all top secret. Nobody was supposed what was being done here.
They had dug it all out and there were all of these corpses. Then they [the Jews] had to undress. Mothers were still carrying their children, usually in one arm. And then they would have to go up there, and they shot them. I saw everything, everything.
...
I just thought to myself, "something like this just can't happen."
That was in 1942, in October 1942. I can only say that after this experience I sat down and wrote a letter to my wife. That is to say that after I had seen all of that, I then wrote, "If there is any God at all, then Germany should never be allowed to win this war.

His interview covers 12 pages and is just one of many. It is a very chilling and informative read if you are into the history of it all, but it is a hard read.

**KalashnikovMarine**

I strongly recommend the book Black Edelweiss, it's a memoir written immediately after the war by a young Waffen SS machine gunner. He is very detailed in his writing, and his own examination of himself. http://www.amazon.com/Black-Edelweiss-Conscience-Soldier-Waffen-SS/dp/0966638980/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1371971821&sr=8-1&keywords=black+edelweiss

The Amazon description sums it up nicely.

As it joins the ranks of the books in this genre, Black Edelweiss makes a unique and very important contribution. It is a true, personal account of the author’s war years, first at school and then with the Waffen-SS, which he joined early in 1943 at the age of seventeen. For a year and a half, the author fought as a machine gunner in SS-Mountain Infantry Regiment 11 "Reinhard Heydrich," mainly in the arctic and sub-arctic reaches of Soviet Karelia and Finland, and later at the Western frontier of the Third Reich. The characters in the story are real, and the conversations and actions are recounted to the best of his ability from the short distance at which he wrote the manuscript in 1945–46.

Apart from the piercing insights into the question of why the German soldier fought as he did, what makes this book truly unique is the author’s anguished, yet resolute examination of the dialectic between the honorable and valorous comportment of his comrades and the fundamentally reprehensible conduct of about 35,000 men behind the front lines who nevertheless wore the same uniform.

During his captivity, the author was assigned for a time as a clerk to a US Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps officer, and in the performance of his administrative duties, the author had access to the mounting reams of documentation of the Holocaust. His growing recognition of the involvement of Waffen-SS personnel in the monstrous crimes of that process caused him to dig deeply into his soul, to examine his most intimate and private motivations and thoughts, and to reevaluate the most basic assumptions of his life to that point. The author captured this process and the result in the notes which became this book.

Honestly, forthrightly, and courageously told, Black Edelweiss is a precious gift to historians and other students of World War II. It not only provides a glimpse into the attributes that made the German armed forces a formidable and tenacious foe, but squarely confronts the most painful issue facing German World War II veterans in general, and Waffen-SS veterans in particular.

Hard a read as it is, this book is one of the gems of my collection.

**Frazzled**

Relapse wrote:
Captain Fantastic wrote:
The atrocities these men have seen with their own eyes probably make the pictures even worse. How would it feel? To know you fought for nothing, and lost?

These are POWs. Men who have likely seen their brothers cut in half with machine guns, blown into pieces, and dismembered beyond recognition. Experiences like that probably left these men screaming in the middle of the night for the rest of their lives.

Inspiring picture, OP.

The thing that really sets off what you say is the fact after all they have gone through that you mention, that some of the soldiers appear to be crying at what they are seeing while others can't seem to bring themselves to look. Their thought process at that moment in time must have been soul crushing.
It's also interesting to me that there appear to be a lot of medics in the crowd.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

d-usa wrote:
While a decent number knew what was actually going on, many knew the rumors. But the rumors, while true, were so outlandish that most people who have heard them didn't believe them.

A good example of this nowadays are the differences in opinion about drone strikes. What's really true and what's hyperbole?

One guy on the top right seems pretty intrigued.