There is a small town in France called Oradour-Sur-Glane (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane) which was the site of a Nazi atrocity on June 10th 1944, just a few days after the Normandy landings. I've been there with my wife and son, and it is quite sobering. The details of the atrocity can be found at the above linked Wikipedia page, but suffice it to say that a company of SS troopers murdered 642 civilians in a reprisal against activities of the Resistance. There are about 3 or 4 different towns in the immediate region within a 25-30 mile radius or so of this town which all have the name "Oradour," and they are distinguished one from the others by the names of the rivers on which they are located—many small towns and villages in rural France being located on or near navigable waterways. The town of Oradour in which the atrocity occurred is located on the Glane river, hence the name "Oradour-sur-Glane," which translates as "Oradour on the Glane."VMI77 wrote:Also, in the beginning they filled the back of large delivery trucks with Jews, ported in the exhaust gases, and drove around until they were all dead. This was more discreet and more efficient than shooting but not efficient enough (and body disposal was also a problem), so they scaled up from trucks to gas chambers and furnaces. And while I don't remember the exact chronology I believe they also started off with killing handicapped children. They took them from their homes telling the parents that they were sending them to medical facilities to help them with their condition and then killed them. After awhile people started to catch on. They also attempted to kill disabled veterans but gave up as there was actually backlash from killing children and wounded vets, and the regime decided to conserve resources and postpone these elements of the final solution until after the war.Jaguar wrote:Not that I believe we are making boxcars for people, the ones I've seen as examples of "prison boxcars" were for automobiles, not people ready.mamabearCali wrote:not that I would put this past some of the evil outfits hanging about, but in truth why would a dictator bother with boxcars and shackles. If they are going to kill a bunch of us, I would think there are much more efficient ways to accomplish their goals. If they (whoever "they" are) want to kill us individually why bother with shackles and trains....bullets are much cheaper. This sounds like something out of a book really, and not aware of modern methods of warfare. If their goal is enslavement of the people, they might get away with it a little (inner cities and such) but once they get past those places you are looking at body counts not trains.
In short, this does not make sense in the context of our day and time.
However, the Nazi's started off with just shooting people. It didn't work well since the guards were people and people have an aversion to killing others. Not all, but the majority do, so they had to come up with a better way to implement the "final solution". Turns out, guards do not have as much of an aversion to herding people into rooms, and you can always find that "one" who will happily drop cyanide in from outside, then just force other prisoners to clean up the mess.
It doesn't make it right or better, or even close, but mass killing in this manner was the way the Nazi's could get it done with the least amount of strife.
Sad that that much thought went into killing innocent people.
Tragically, this atrocity was mistakenly carried out against the "wrong target." The actual town which the Nazis were targeting was "Oradour-sur-Vayres" (which I've been to also), which was a hub for Resistance activity in the region, and the Nazis were too flippin' stupid to realize that they were assaulting the wrong town.
Anyway, Oradour-sur-Glane was never rebuilt on its original site. Instead, the French government built a "new" town on the other side of the local highway, and it preserved the destroyed town as a museum to commemorate the great evil of the 3rd Reich. When you visit Oradour, you enter through an underground museum that passes under the highway separating the new from the old towns. In that museum are many artifacts of the local Nazi occupation.
Among those artifacts are displayed actual memos sent from Berlin to local SS commanders, with very detailed instructions on how to properly dig a mass-murder trench, with the required angles of the trench walls which on the one hand will keep the trench from collapsing, but will on the other hand most efficiently cause the machine-gunned bodies to roll down to the bottom of the trench without stacking up against the near side. I've never gotten over that. The brutality of the murderers on the scene is bad enough. But when a government is so thoroughly evil to its core that some faceless bureaucrat with an engineering bent can draw up a memo to describe, not just as theory, but how to actually practice the mass extermination of civilian populations most efficiently and tidily, then that government has gone beyond being merely corrupt, and has entered the realm of being satanically evil.
I absolutely believe that our government is corrupt to its core—not the standards set down by the Founders upon which it is built—but rather that the government no longer serves the people, and exists only to justify its own power and to expand its reach. Power corrupts, etc., etc. BUT, I don't think that our government is yet to the point of being satanically evil in the same way that the 3rd Reich was satanically evil. Not yet. And that is why I believe that A) it can be turned around if some sanity is restored to the political process; and B) why I cannot buy into crazy Nazi conspiracy theories about FEMA prison camps and nonsense like that. Not yet. It's all about "playing it forward." Do I believe that if this nation does not change the arc upon which it is embarked it could eventually degenerate to that point? Absolutely. But I don't think we're there yet.
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