Remembering the Holocaust and That Evildoers' Looks Can Be Deceiving

SS personnel, including commandant Franz Reichleitner and deputy commandant
Johann Niemann, gather on a patio at Sobibor in 1943, drinking from glasses that
historians say could have been stolen from murdered Jews.

There is much media coverage of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp and other atrocities of the Holocaust.  The coverage is needed for multiple reasons, not the least of which are (i) far too many Americans know little about the Holocaust - an indictment of America's education system - (ii) hate is on the rise among right wing political and terrorist groups, and (ii) America is currently mistreating thousands of Central American refugees in conditions that are little better than concentrations camps even as the Trump/Pence regime (with the blessing of the right wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court) is reviving immigration restrictions like the ones used to bar European Jews from finding refuge from Nazi controlled Europe.  One of the things most disturbing about the Holocaust and those who murdered millions of other humans is that they looked so ordinary,  not like horrific monsters.  Indeed, they look no different than many in Trump's base who vary from indifferent to the suffering of others to those who are motivated by hate and racism.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at newly released photos of Nazi SS personnel and death camp commanders that urgently need to remind us that looks can be deceiving and that one's actions and/or willingness to be complicit in (or not actively oppose) evil are the true signs of moral bankruptcy.  Here are article highlights:

Historians in Germany have unearthed hundreds of photos of the notorious Sobibor death camp and other key sites in the Nazi extermination machine, stashed for decades in albums belonging to the camp's deputy commandant and in the attic and cupboards of the family home.

Previously, only two images of Sobibor existed in the archival record. The SS bulldozed the death camp — in a swampy, wooded area about 120 miles southeast of Warsaw — to hide evidence of mass murder.

The photos, made public in Berlin on Tuesday following the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, for the first time show SS leaders and their auxiliaries at Sobibor.

The images do not document the atrocities that went on there — how, in a period of 17 months, at least 167,000 Jews were killed in the gas chambers, their bodies later burned over an oven made of rail tracks.

Rather, historians in Germany and Washington describe the images as a devastating reminder of how life went on amid industrialized murder. The photos show smiling German officers posing with piglets and listening to an accordion player. Some sip from crystal glasses possibly stolen from their victims.

“It’s really disturbing,” said Andreas Kahrs, a historian with the Stanislaw Hantz Educational Center in Germany, which helped collect and analyze the photos. “You’d never guess that these SS officers drinking wine and beer are there at Sobibor. Then you realize the context. You know they are picnicking surrounded by the belongings of the Jews they murdered.”

One photo offers a glimpse of the roof of the gas chamber at Sobibor, along with a building where Jewish women were forced to shave their heads. Another shows the benign entrance of the death camp, where a fence stuffed with pine branches obscures what was happening inside. A third shows SS officers drinking and grinning on a patio of a mess hall known as the “Casino.”

The images belonged to Johann Niemann, one of the top SS officers at the death camp, who documented his rise through the ranks of the Third Reich in two photo albums: one bound in synthetic leather and embossed with the name of his previous SS unit, the other with an image of a sailing ship on the cover.

He died in October 1943, when the 600 remaining prisoners at Sobibor staged a revolt, killing more than a dozen German officers and auxiliary guards. Niemann, the acting commandant at the time, was lured to the tailor’s barracks with the promise of a leather jacket and killed by an ax to the head.

After a hero’s funeral, his belongings were sent to his wife.

The photos follow Niemann’s participation in Operation Reinhard, the secret SS plan to annihilate the Jews of occupied Poland. More than 1.7 million Jews were murdered between 1942 and 1943. Niemann’s photos of auxiliary guards from an SS training camp in the nearby Polish village of Trawniki were particularly intriguing to historians. Only a small number of German officers staffed the death camps. Instead, historians say, the SS relied on men from Trawniki to guard prisoners and operate the gas chambers. Historians in Germany said two photos of Trawniki guards may include accused Nazi collaborator John Demjanjuk, who was denaturalized in the United States and sent to Germany in 2009 to stand trial for his actions at Sobibor. Demjanjuk was convicted in 2011 and sentenced to prison for his role in the murder of more than 28,000 Jews at the death camp. He died a year later while the case was on appeal. Some of the photos recovered by historians show Niemann and Sobibor personnel on a field trip to Berlin. The group snapped photos on breaks by the side of the road, in beer gardens and at historical monuments. They are also pictured with high-ranking members of Hitler’s Chancellery. “They returned to the so-called normal world, the world of morals, of families, of more human ways of doing things, and then returned and continued doing this slaughter of human beings,” Friedberg said.

Frighteningly, we have would be Niemanns in our midst - Trump adviser Stephen Miller, a man condemned by his own relatives, immediately springs to mind.  

We must never forget and we can begin by voting out every politician who closes his or her eyes to evil being done by the current occupant of the White House and his sycophants and congressional enablers. . 

Kirstjen Nielsen Enforced Trump's Cruelty at the Border

Kirstjen Nielsen - handmaiden of evil.

Hopefully, history will be very cruel to Kirstjen Nielsen who as Secretary of Homeland Security enforced Donald Trump's horrific family separation policy which has left countless children separated from the parents.  It not's too much of a stretch to imagine Nielsen as a Nazi death camp commander or SS commander who saw her victims as less than human and, therefore deserving of any imaginable mistreatment. She's a symbol of the inhumane policies of Der  Trumpenführer, yet frighteningly, her replacement may be even more morally bankrupt give that Trump's main complaint was that she was not sufficiently brutal in pushing his racist policies.  An editorial in the New York Times looks at Nielsen's departure and the possibility of worse horrors ahead.  Here are excerpts: 

Time finally ran out for Kirstjen Nielsen, President Trump’s beleaguered secretary of homeland security.

The terms of Ms. Nielsen’s departure were unclear. She met with the president on Sunday evening to discuss continuing problems at the southern border. At the conclusion of the meeting, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that Ms. Nielsen “will be leaving her position” and thanked her for her service, implying he had asked her to step down. Ms. Nielsen issued a formal letter of resignation, saying it was the “right time for me to step aside.”

Considering the long-simmering tensions between the president and Ms. Nielsen, the most surprising thing about her departure may be that it didn’t happen months ago.

She was said to have become increasingly insecure in her job in recent weeks, as Mr. Trump repeatedly railed about the chaos at the border and vowed to move in a “tougher” direction. [Trump] The president grew impatient with Ms. Nielsen’s insistence that federal law and international obligations limited her actions.

It’s no secret that Mr. Trump had a problem with Ms. Nielsen, whom he considered “weak” on matters of border security. [Trump] The president and Stephen Miller, his hard-line immigration adviser, have long grumbled privately about the secretary’s insufficiently brutal approach to the surge in migrant families across the border.

In her resignation letter released on Sunday, Ms. Nielsen noted, “For more than two years of service beginning during the Presidential Transition, I have worked tirelessly to advance the goals and missions of the Department.”

This is hardly something to brag about. Whatever the secretary’s personal views, and no matter how impossible her job, she was the face of some of the administration’s most poorly conceived and gratuitously callous policies. At best, she was complicit and, yes, hopelessly weak.

Sadly, Ms. Nielsen’s response to her boss’s displeasure and abuse was both morally anemic and strategically incoherent. Last summer, as Republicans and Democrats — and many in the American public — protested the administration’s practice of tearing migrant children from their parents at the border, Ms. Nielsen rushed to publicly defend the policy. Scratch that. She insisted, repeatedly and bizarrely, that the administration had no such policy, even as her agency was enforcing and justifying it.

On the critical question of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elections, she was even less lucid. At times, she seemed to support the intelligence community’s findings that the Kremlin had been up to no good. Other times, she supported the view that Russia had not favored Mr. Trump in the election. Her every utterance seemed designed to obfuscate rather than clarify.

For now, Ms. Nielsen’s acting replacement will be Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. This leaves Homeland Security without a top official at either of its critical immigration agencies.

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said of Ms. Nielsen’s departure, “It is deeply alarming that the Trump administration official who put children in cages is reportedly resigning because she is not extreme enough for the White House’s liking.”

If Ms. Nielsen wants to perform one last act of public service, she could come clean about the costs of the policies she enforced over the past year and half, not only to the desperate migrants seeking a better life in the United States, but also to the thousands of employees of her department charged with carrying out an inhumane and ineffective set of policies.