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VMI77 wrote:

mamabearCali wrote:I think the germans had mostly been disarmed though by that point.....what if those same scared townspeople had had rifles and knowing that atrocities were taking place had sniped the guards, and freed the people? What if the ex-military had been taking out the locomotives to the trains that were hauling people away with IED's. What if every SS officer had to be afraid that with his next round up he would be on the wrong end of a bullet.....I think things might have shaken out different than they did. You see, as long as we as a people have a method to defend ourselves, as long as we have a mindset to defend ourselves where there is a will there will be a way.

I think your starting assumption...that most Germans were opposed to what was happening, or would be opposed if they were better informed...is false. The numbers are debatable, but many Germans supported what was happening, and it was only after the war that they began saying they didn't know --which is hogwash. It was almost impossible not to know. Trains full of Jews screaming and moaning sat in train yards for hours, and sometimes days. People used to stand by the train tracks and curse them as they went by. The concentration camps employed local workers, like electricians and carpenters. Those few in the military who wouldn't follow orders were simply killed. Furthermore, most of the occupied European countries freely turned over Jews and other "undesirables" to the Nazis.

The murders and slave labor were not some isolated and invisible event --it permeated all of German society. Werner Von Braun, for example, calculated the minimum number of calories necessary to keep slave laborers alive for a month, while building the V-2 rockets. Engineers designed the extermination methods, architects designed the camps, bureaucrats ordered and payed for material, manufacturing plants produced things like Zyklon B for the gas chambers, businessmen supplied their factories with slave labor, farmers supplied concentration camps with food. Everyone who worked in a train yard or lived near tracks or a train station saw and heard what was happening.

As far as resistance goes, virtually the same things happened in Russia under Stalin. People did not resist. The Russians got so that instead of sending a whole company out for a roundup they sent just one militiaman, and people would obediently line up and let him lead them away. The Germans would simply issue public orders for Jews to appear at such and such a place, and they would. Very few refused to show up when merely ordered to do so. Defense is more mindset than weapons. Most people don't fight and won't fight when a situation is ambiguous. Many may fight when they sense death is certain, but these mass exterminations work by preying on ambiguity: death is certain if you resist, uncertain if you don't. It's the same reason people will allow themselves to be herded into a walk-in freezer by gunmen, and kneel down to be executed: most of those that might resist lack certainty until it's too late to act.

Jaguar wrote:

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.

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.

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.