Surviving the Nazis, Only to Be Jailed by America

[Behind the Aegis]

WORLD leaders gathered at Auschwitz last month to mark the liberation 70 years earlier of the Nazis’ most infamous concentration camp. More ceremonies will follow in coming months to remember the Allied forces’ discovery, in rapid succession, of other Nazi concentration camps at places like Bergen-Belsen that winter and spring of 1945.

Largely lost to history, however, is the cruel reality of what “liberation” actually meant for hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors discovered barely alive in the Nazi camps.

---snip---

Faced with complaints by outside Jewish groups about conditions of “abject misery,” President Harry S. Truman sent a former immigration official, Earl Harrison, to Europe to inspect the camps. His findings were blistering. The survivors “have been ‘liberated’ more in a military sense than actually,” Harrison wrote Truman in the summer of 1945.

“As matters now stand,” he wrote, “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops.”

---snip---

“Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals,” Patton wrote. He complained of how the Jews in one camp, with “no sense of human relationships,” would defecate on the floors and live in filth like lazy “locusts,” and he told of taking his commander, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, to tour a makeshift synagogue set up to commemorate the holy day of Yom Kippur.

more: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/sunday-review/surviving-the-nazis-only-to-be-jailed-by-america.html?_r=0

Mosby

[hr]

This a part of the Holocaust for which many are clueless.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

1. I never knew Patton held those views

[Behind the Aegis]

4. It was pretty jarring to learn his real feelings.

It was something I didn't know until a few years ago. It isn't all that surprising the Holocaust even took place given those were the feelings of people after the event!

[loyalsister]

7. During the Eugenics movement Jewish people were targeted in the US

The Eugenics Records Office even had a classification system the sorted Jews by geography. Our hideous role in the holocaust is pretty disturbing. Ultimately, if not for the international response to Germany it could have gotten much uglier here. It's a horrifying fact that my life and the lives of many others would have been worse if not for an attempted genocide.

"The Germans are beating us at our own game" said Joseph De Jarnette (superintendent of Virginias Western State Hospital) to the Richmond Times- Dispatch.

As an aside: In the midst of that movement in the US and abroad, it's hard to argue that there weren't some people who used religion as a justification. Especially among those whose motivation was to prevent suffering and\or damage to society as a whole.

[HeiressofBickworth]

2. Now here's a thought

So why didn't they return the prisoners to their HOMES. You know, the properties they were forcible removed from which were then given to Nazi party members to live in. A fitting result would be for the Nazi party members to become homeless.

[Behind the Aegis]

3. In some cases, they tried.

Another 1600 survivors lost their lives.

[unblock]

11. my grandparents would not have wanted to go back to the neighborhood with someone who betrayed them

they never knew who tipped the s.s. off as to their presence, or even if anyone did, maybe it was just a routine building-to-building check. they were very lucky. there were three jewish units. the s.s. found one jewish family on the first floor, and two jewish families living together in a unit on the second floor. counting to three, the s.s. left, not bothering to check the third floor which housed my grandparents and my mother, then a baby.

when the super found out later that day, he evicted them on the spot, fearing for his own life.


i can't imagine wanting to go back and live in a place like that, even if told things had changed.

[Tsiyu]

5. I watched some of the film from the Hitchcock movie,

and did not realize before watching, how long the prisoners had to remain in the camps after they were "liberated." And I did not know that many emaciated prisoners died when the soldiers, being compassionate, fed them the wrong things.

You can't just go back to eating regular food when you've been starved. Your body doesn't have the resources to digest and use nutrition.

Just like people will become feral when they are treated worse than animals, and they are in a fight for survival. One of the remarkable things to one photographer was how antisocial the prisoners were at first, but how a few days of decent treatment, warm clothes and food turned them into civilized people again.

I only watched a few videos of the making of the film, but it was heartwrenching.

Also, a question above about returning them to their homes: many did not want to ever go back to Germany, and with a war-torn Europe, there were no resources to initially move anyone anywhere.

[ReRe]

6. Things haven't changed much at all...

... have they? They came up with the funds for the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, but didn't have the funds to take care of the liberated Jews. Sound familiar? It's maddening to know that this country is continually led by such uncaring monsters. If you have two choices, one is the right choice and the other is the wrong choice, why does this country continually make the wrong choice decade after decade, century after century? "Shining city on a hill" my arse. The USA could have saved the world. But noooooooo, all we could think of was money, money,. money, more, more, more. I've got to stop. This has me so upset I'm having an asthma attack and need to stop and do a neb. The insolence just takes my breath away! Sorry.

[loyalsister]

8. rugged individualism and a sense of entitlement

define the establishment and continued policy and social fabric of this country. We are entitled to a chunk of land, all the fossil fuels we can use, modern conveniences.... regardless of what kind of price we pay and inflict upon the rest of the world via environmental damage. AND, the opportunity to be superior to someone is the American dream- because "it makes people concerned for the day they're gonna be rich" (according to Jed Bartlett)
Yes, ugly Americans. Many of us are helplessly watching and wishing we could convince others.

[Tsiyu]

9. Well, later, yes

I was speaking of the logistics immediately following the camps being liberated, but yes, America is run by the greedy for the greedy.

And anyone who buys corporate products made with slave labor or works for a corporation that exploits its workers is also complicit in the greed. If you have mutual funds invested in for-profit prisons or Big Pharm, you're guilty.

We need a major reset of the human capacity to feel more nurturing for each other than for our stuff and our money.

But no: we love shiny and sparkly and smart, no matter who suffers so that we may have it.

We are all guilty. All of us.

[ReRe]

13. The USA needs a "values" adjustment...

... alright. Screw perceptions. Screw keeping-up-with-the-Joneses'.

[Telcontar]

12. And the prize for history fail goes to....

Marshall Plan wasnt enacted until 1948

[ReRe]

14. Yes, I'm a knee-jerk liberal...

... have been since I was 5 yrs old. Knit-pick if you like, and since you did, how do you feel about our 'bassackards values system, and not doing the right thing for the tortured concentration camp survivors upon liberation at the end of WWII?

[Telcontar]

15. I've been to Dachau

The sad fact is liberation did not equal salvation. The prisoners couldn't simply be let loose, they were starving. They would have engorged themselves on whatever foof they found and then died. You can't just feed starving people, there is a medical process; sort of like you can't feed an infant a cheese burger.

[ReRe]

16. They belonged in a HOSPITAL...

... for cripes sake. They needed to be stabilized and then transported out of the GD country to Allied safe havens. And they were in those camps for how long after the war?

[Telcontar]

19. I dont think you fully understand the magnitude of the problem

There were tens of thousands. There was a war on. All logistics available went to winning the war. There were no alllied safehavens, the allies had to force entry and advance into Europe

[ReRe]

21. We are having a failure to communicate

I DO understand the magnitude of the problem. There were tens of thousands of suffering human beings in all of the camps AFTER the war was concluded and you seem to be defending that mishandling. Troll till your hearts desire, but I won't be responding to you again.

[Telcontar]

22. I am so sorry

I didn't know I was interfering with an agenda. I thought we were having a discussion. Post-WW2 history is of interest to me and I thought we were having a free exchange of ideas and knowledge; please forgive me for not realizing this was more Blame America First bandwagoning.

For anyone else who might be interested in this period of time:
http://www.palyam.org/About_us/displaySOHarticle?name=Liberation%20Of%20The%20Camps&id=t00069&bl=b00069

The liberation of the camps was a major trauma for the Allied Armies...But it turned out that neither the Army nor UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), was prepared for relief work on the scale required, and had not taken into consideration the necessary physical and mental rehabilitation of the survivors. Tens of thousands of ravenous survivors, were gripped with an overwhelming obsession to eat without limitation, and paid for this with their lives. UNRRA, like the military, did not grasp the need to distinguish between Jewish refugees and the millions of other prisoners and forced workers, including Nazi collaborators, who should have been speedily returned to their countries of origin. In the first stage they all remained in the same camps, which became DP (displaced persons) camps.

Immediately after the liberation of the Camps, Jewish soldiers serving in the Allied Forces, made contact with the survivors. American Rabbis and members of the Jewish Brigade Group came to the camps on their own initiative and tried to make things easier for the survivors. The criticism leveled at the grave condition of the displaced Jews, led to the establishment of an American Commission of Inquiry, which condemned the military policies in the camps and recommended the setting up of separate camps for displaced Jews. This made possible the organization of the survivors as an independent Jewish entity.

The liberation of the camps by the Allies was not just a supreme humanitarian act but was of major historical importance in the fight, which continues to this day, against those who deny that the Holocaust ever took place.

Here, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Western Allied Forces in Europe, envisioned the future..." I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at firsthand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that 'the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda'."

[NaturalHigh]

10. I had no idea.

Interesting that I didn't know this since I have a bachelor's degree in history. I guess it's not commonly taught in out colleges. I wonder why.

[Behind the Aegis]

20. It is amazing what is not taught.

I have been doing my own research for years and just when I think I got a handle on it, another layer emerges. It is frustrating and defeating.

[Sissyk]

17. K&R

Thank you, BtA!

I will admit I was mostly clueless. Very informative read.

[sabrina 1]

18. I recently read two books by women, one who was a part of the underground movement

in France, the other, married to a Jewish man and their lives during the war, and was surprised to learn what the 'liberation' actually looked like.

I also read Ron Wyden's father's account of his family's life before they fled, and then his return years later to look for people he had known.

So many stories that were never written, but the few who were tell a very different story to the official one.

Thanks for the OP.

[Solly Mack]

23. K&R