I found this interesting photo album from the United States Holocaust Museum.
Germans having a jolly good time while the Jews were being exterminated.
The photos shown here are of German military having a good time, relaxing, singing and other leisure activities.
We've all seen the horror pictures of the inmates of Auschwitz, we've seen the movies that try to depict the horror and read the first hand accounts of books written by survivors.
What is hard for me to visualize is the good times that the Germans were having amongst all this horror.
The callousness of humanity is just unbelievable.
3 comments:
The Japanese atrocites toward the Chinese were about 10 times worse but are almost forgotten.
I guess westerners are more inclined to be shocked at atrocities against other westerners.
The germans did a good job at dehumanizing the Jew which made it really easy to procede with the "final solution"
It's getting hard for me to be shocked by the depravity and cruelty of humanity these days.
Different time - different culture. People view life and act according to the knowledge they have and the prevailing ethic. I'm not excusing what they did but you have to put it in perspective. They really believed that Jews were evil and they were doing a good thing by getting rid of them.
There are still many who feel the same way.
It amazes me that there are people who truly think other people are not really people. Re-education is slow and hard. It is hard not to vilify another group if "they" are perceived to have done you wrong in some way. Or are a perceived threat. Problem is, some of them are likely to be dangerous while the rest are innocuous but how do you tell the difference? Like Muslims vs the West.
Hammer, we have all become desensitized.
Jeannie, it's always a challenge to stop viewing others as US and THEM.
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