Het blijken er 42500 te zijn.
In de kleinsten zaten 12 mensen. In het grootste ( het Warschaw Ghetto) zaten 500.000 mensen.
We lezen hoe één man in vijf jaar tijd in vijf kampen zat, onder andere in Auschwitz.
Volgens Raul Hilberg zijn er 5 miljoen joden gestorven in de oorlog: gaskamers, ziekte, honger.
Pas in januari 1942 besloten duitse militairen om de joden bijeen te gaan brengen en zichzelf te laten doodwerken. Dat staat in de Wannsee Konferenz documenten.
Over gaskamers en op industriele wijzen de mensen doden lezen we daar niks. Zelfs Raul Hilberg moest in 1980 toegeven dat er nergens documenten te vinden zijn die wijzen op een geplande vernietiging. Maar, zegt Hilberg: die vernietiging heeft wel plaatsgevonden, en de uitvoerenden werkten min of meer intuitief samen.
Ik vraag me dan af: hoe kwam het geld bij elkaar voor die intuitieve werkzaamheden? Wie hakte de knoop door bij onenigheid? Hebben we meer voorbeelden van een 'geoliede machine' die blijkt zonder budget, afspraken en documenten te verlopen ?
De New York Times gaf in 2013 de resultaten van dat 13 jaar durende onderzoek en zegt: "De Holocaust was nog schokkender dan we al dachten."
Maar dat begrijp ik niet zo goed.
Uit dit onderzoek blijkt dat de Wannsee Konferenz -plannen inderdaad zijn uitgevoerd: de joden werden overal ingezet om te werken. Als het kleinste kamp 12 mensen omvat, en het grootste 500.000, zou dan de gemiddelde niet op 120 mogen worden gesteld?
Als er 5.1 miljoen mensen zijn gedood, zoals Hilberg zegt, en als er 42500 kampen waren, dan zouden er gemiddeld per kamp 120 mensen zijn.
Als het kleinste kamp 12 mensen omvat, en het grootste 500.000, dan lijkt me 120 gemiddeld geen onwaarschijnlijk aantal.
We weten dat een deel van de joden is ontsnapt naar Rusland en Israel, zoals Menachem Begin.
We weten dat de mensen in de grotere concentratiekampen, zoals Auschwitz, 'voor de Russen uit ' vluchtten, richting Bergen Belsen. ( Bron: Elie Wiesel. Primo levie) Maar ze waren ook vrij om in het kamp te wachten op de Russen. De joden waren zo bang gemaakt voor de Russen dat de meesten mee vluchtten naar het westen. Maar diegenen die bleven, zoals Elie Wiesel, is geen haar gekrenkt.
Het is helemaal niet onmogelijk dat vele joden verder naar het Oosten zijn gevlucht, en in Rusland zijn gebleven. Het was niet in Russisch belang om dit aan de grote klok te hangen: dat zou namelijk de Nazi-misdaad kleiner maken, en dat wilde Rusland niet.
Ik begrijp wel waarom dit onderzoek alleen in de NY Times is verschenen, want het maakt de Nazi misdaden veel MINDER schokkend dan we tot nu toe hebben aangenomen!
Deze passage vind ik lastig te interpreteren:
The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.)
En: waarom weet men in 2013 al dat 3 van de 5 delen pas over 12 jaar zullen worden gepubliceerd?
Heb ik misschien gelijk en heeft men hier zelf ontdekt dat het Holocaust verhaal wat complexer is dan we nu elke dag te horen krijgen?
Wanneer zal het meesterwerk van Solzhenitsyn ( 200 year together) in het Engels verschijnen?
En bewijst het ontbreken van dit boek in de engelse taal niet dat er geen sprake is van persvrijheid?
Er is zelfs een term voor al sween uitgever een boek wel koopt ( de rechten) en wel drukt , maar vervolgens alles doet om de verkoop NIET te bevorderen. ( Peter Dale Scott heeft dat woord genoemd, maar ik ben het nu vergeten) . Zo kun je toch al jouw vijanden vernietigen ( de Vrijheid van Meningsuiting is in de VS een zeer groot recht) , maar zelf immuun zijn voor aanvallen op jezelf.
Hier het artikel in de NYT:
The Holocaust Just Got More
Shocking
By ERIC LICHTBLAUMARCH 1, 2013
Onderschrift bij een foto: A group of Jewish women at the entrance
to the Brody ghetto in Eastern Galicia, 1942. The sign is written in German,
Ukrainian and Polish.CreditUnited
States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Collection of Eugenia Hochberg Lanceter
THIRTEEN
years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim
task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and
killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.
What
they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the
Holocaust.
The
researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout
Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself,
during Hitler’s
reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.
The
figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure
they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings
at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in
Washington.
“The
numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute,
said in an interview after learning of the new data.
“We knew
before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the
numbers are unbelievable.”
The
documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of
forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war
camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were
forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels,
where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.
Auschwitz
and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi
killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for
imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a
single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites,
infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire
German network, the new research makes painfully clear.
The maps
the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide
sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery —
centered in Germany and Poland,
but reaching in all directions.
The lead
editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20
million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified
as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust
museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.)
The
existence of many individual camps and ghettos was previously known only on a
fragmented, region-by-region basis. But the researchers, using data from some
400 contributors, have been documenting the entire scale for the first time,
studying where they were located, how they were run, and what their purpose
was.
The
brutal experience of Henry Greenbaum, an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor who
lives outside Washington, typifies the wide range of Nazi sites.
When Mr.
Greenbaum, a volunteer at the Holocaust museum, tells visitors today about his
wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at
Auschwitz, the most notorious of all the camps.
But the
images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his
memory as deeply as the concentration camp number — A188991 — tattooed on his left
forearm.
In an
interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid.
First
came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans
herded his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12.
Next
came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he
and a sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at
Treblinka. After his regular work shift at a factory, the Germans would force
him and other prisoners to dig trenches that were used for dumping the bodies
of victims. He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed to work at a chemical
manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he and some 50
other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken to
manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at
Flossenbürg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on
his 5-foot-8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.
By the
age of 17, Mr. Greenbaum had been enslaved in five camps in five years, and was
on his way to a sixth, when American soldiers freed him in 1945. “Nobody even
knows about these places,” Mr. Greenbaum said. “Everything should be
documented. That’s very important. We try to tell the youngsters so that they
know, and they’ll remember.”
The
research could have legal implications as well by helping a small number of
survivors document their continuing claims over unpaid insurance policies,
looted property, seized land and other financial matters.
“HOW
many claims have been rejected because the victims were in a camp that we
didn’t even know about?” asked Sam Dubbin, a Florida lawyer who represents a
group of survivors who are seeking to bring claims against European insurance
companies.
Dr.
Megargee, the lead researcher, said the project was changing the understanding
among Holocaust scholars of how the camps and ghettos evolved.
As early
as 1933, at the start of Hitler’s reign, the Third Reich established about 110
camps specifically designed to imprison some 10,000 political opponents and
others, the researchers found. As Germany invaded and began occupying European
neighbors, the use of camps and ghettos was expanded to confine and sometimes
kill not only Jews but also homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and many
other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe. The camps and ghettos varied enormously
in their mission, organization and size, depending on the Nazis’ needs, the
researchers have found.
The
biggest site identified is the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, which held about 500,000
people at its height. But as few as a dozen prisoners worked at one of the
smallest camps, the München-Schwabing site in Germany. Small groups of
prisoners were sent there from the Dachau concentration camp under armed guard.
They were reportedly whipped and ordered to do manual labor at the home of a
fervent Nazi patron known as “Sister Pia,” cleaning her house, tending her
garden and even building children’s toys for her.
When the
research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000
Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept
climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.
The
numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980
concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex
slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and
infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting
victims to killing centers.
In
Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew
houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.
Dr.
Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many
German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must
have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.
“You
literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor
camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”
Eric Lichtblau is a reporter for The New York Times in
Washington and a visiting fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum.
A version of this news analysis appears
in print on March 3, 2013, on Page SR3 of the New York edition with
the headline: The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking. Order
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