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| 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. .
