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Some Surprising Responses On Anne Frank's Cause Of Death


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2022 Apr 5, 3:33am   904 views  15 comments

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#annafrank Since I was a young child, I have known the poignant story of Anne Frank and her family. For decades, I assumed that she was taken to the gas chamber in a death camp. Yesterday I read a fascinating new report with great authority. When Anna was arrested, she first found herself in a very civilized almost low-security camp. For some reason, she found herself transferred to a death camp. Reports from survivors said that she appeared to give up hope and the will to resist. She took sick with typhus and died.
I reported this on my Facebook timeline. I got some surprising responses. Every person commented that it was immaterial how Anne died. The Nazis created the conditions that led to her death. They killed her.
To me, the worst way to die would be execution by some impersonal state authority (electric chair, firing squad, gas chamber, lethal injection, etc.) I have read reports on what it was like for Jewish inmates to die in the gas chamber. I will not describe it here. It is chilling. At least Anne had some choice in how her life ended. Sadly, and ironically, she died just before the camp was liberated. She just needed to hold on a little longer.
In early 1945, my father accompanied General George S. Patton when he took a tour of a liberated Nazi death camp. General Patton vomited and cried. Dad had to be very drunk to talk to me about the horrors that he saw that day. I get very angry when I encounter a Holocaust denier.

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11   stereotomy   2024 Feb 4, 9:08am  

https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-holocaust-denial/

Over the years, Holocaust scholars and activists have very rightfully emphasized the absolutely unprecedented nature of the historical events they have studied. They describe how some six million innocent Jewish civilians were deliberately exterminated, mostly in gas chambers, by one of Europe’s most highly cultured nations, and emphasize that monstrous project was often accorded greater priority than Germany’s own wartime military needs during the country’s desperate struggle for survival. Furthermore, the Germans also undertook enormous efforts to totally eliminate all possible traces of their horrifying deed, with huge resources expended to cremate all those millions of bodies and scatter the ashes. This same disappearance technique was even sometimes applied to the contents of their mass graves, which were dug up long after initial burial, so that the rotting corpses could then be totally incinerated and all evidence eliminated. And although Germans are notorious for their extreme bureaucratic precision, this immense wartime project was apparently implemented without benefit of a single written document, or at least no such document has ever been located.

Lipstadt entitled her first book “Beyond Belief,” and I think that all of us can agree that the historical event she and so many others in academia and Hollywood have made the centerpiece of their lives and careers is certainly one of the most extremely remarkable occurrences in all of human history. Indeed, perhaps only a Martian Invasion would have been more worthy of historical study, but Orson Welles’s famous War of the Worlds radio-play which terrified so many millions of Americans in 1938 turned out to be a hoax rather than real.

The six million Jews who died in the Holocaust certainly constituted a very substantial fraction of all the wartime casualties in the European Theater, outnumbering by a factor of 100 all the British who died during the Blitz, and being dozens of times more numerous than all the Americans who fell there in battle. Furthermore, the sheer monstrosity of the crime against innocent civilians would surely have provided the best possible justification for the Allied war effort. Yet for many, many years after the war, a very strange sort of amnesia seems to have gripped most of the leading political protagonists in that regard.

Robert Faurisson, a French academic who became a prominent Holocaust Denier in the 1970s, once made an extremely interesting observation regarding the memoirs of Eisenhower, Churchill, and De Gaulle:

Three of the best known works on the Second World War are General Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday [Country Life Press], 1948), Winston Churchill’s The Second World War (London: Cassell, 6 vols., 1948-1954), and the Mémoires de guerre of General de Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 3 vols., 1954-1959). In these three works not the least mention of Nazi gas chambers is to be found.

Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War total 4,448 pages; and de Gaulle’s three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages. In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi “gas chambers,” a “genocide” of the Jews, or of “six million” Jewish victims of the war.

Given that the Holocaust would reasonably rank as the single most remarkable episode of the Second World War, such striking omissions must almost force us to place Eisenhower, Churchill, and De Gaulle among the ranks of “implicit Holocaust Deniers.”

Many others seem to fall into that same category. In 1981, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, a leading Holocaust scholar, published a short book entitled The Holocaust and the Historians, in which she denounced so many prominent historians for having totally ignored the reality of the Holocaust for many years following World War II. Indeed, discussion of that topic was almost entirely confined to the Jewish Studies programs which committed ethnic activists had newly established at numerous universities throughout the country. Although Lipstadt’s poor scholarly habits and hysterical style hardly impressed me, she appears to have been among the most successful academics who began a career in those ethnic studies departments, which suggests that their average quality was far below her own.

Meanwhile, Dawidowicz emphasized that mainstream histories often entirely omitted the Holocaust from their presentations:

But it is plain from the most cursory review of textbooks and scholarly works by English and American historians that the awesome events of the Holocaust have not been given their historic due. For over two decades some secondary school and college texts never mentioned the subject at all, while others treated it so summarily or vaguely as to fail to convey sufficient information about the events themselves or their historical significance.

With regard to serious scholarship, she notes that when Friedrich Meinecke, universally acknowledged as Germany’s most eminent historian, published The German Catastrophe in 1946, he harshly denounced Hitler as the leader of “a band of criminals” but made absolutely no mention of the Holocaust, which surely would have represented the height of such criminality. Major British accounts of Hitler and World War II by leading historians such as A.J.P. Taylor, H.R. Trevor-Roper, and Alan Bullock were almost as silent. A similar situation occurred in America as late as 1972 when the massive 1,237 page Columbia History of the World, having a Jewish co-editor, devoted a full chapter to World War II but confined its discussion of the Holocaust to just two short and somewhat ambiguous sentences. One almost gets a sense that many of these experienced professional historians regarded discussion of the Holocaust as a considerable embarrassment, a subject that they sought to avoid or at least completely minimize.

Dawidowicz even castigates Slaughterhouse-Five, the 1969 fictional masterpiece by Kurt Vonnegut, for its bald assertion that the firebombing of Dresden was “the greatest massacre in European history,” a claim that seems to reduce the Holocaust to non-existence.
12   stereotomy   2024 Feb 4, 9:13am  

The reason why everyone sought to minimize the holocaust in the first decades after the war was that it was the allies, not the Nazis, who caused the mass deaths in the work camps. Once food and medicine were cut off to the camps due to the allied advances beginning in late 1943, those interned succumbed to starvation and disease. Why did the allies cut off supplies? Simple, these work camps manufactured munitions for the Nazi war effort.

Now that everyone has forgotten who really caused the deaths in the camps, it's time to spin the fairy tale.

They're using the same script to sell climate catastrophe.
13   HeadSet   2024 Feb 4, 7:45pm  

stereotomy says

Now that everyone has forgotten who really caused the deaths in the camps,

The people responsible for the deaths of the inmates are the people who rounded up those inmates and put them into those camps.

stereotomy says

Once food and medicine were cut off to the camps due to the allied advances beginning in late 1943

Exactly how did the allies cut off food and supplies to concentration camps in 1943? D-Day did not even happen until June 1944.
14   stereotomy   2024 Feb 5, 7:04am  

HeadSet says

Exactly how did the allies cut off food and supplies to concentration camps in 1943? D-Day did not even happen until June 1944.

Back then, the "allies" included the Soviet Union. They were very active in '43.
15   HeadSet   2024 Feb 5, 11:16am  

stereotomy says

Back then, the "allies" included the Soviet Union. They were very active in '43.

In Dec 1043, the Germans were still deep into the Soviet Union. So how did the Soviets cut off food and supplies to camps in Poland and Germany?

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