Why did the Jews just let the Nazi's kill them?

EGarrett

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This is from the Schindler's List board over on imdb. If you have an account you can check it out.

bx13th said:
I am no anti-Semite and Schindler’s List is one of my all time favorite films. However, I still do not understand why a great deal of Jewish families allowed the Nazi’s to take their homes, possessions and most cases separate their families?

I have read very little about a large Jewish resistance.

1993 I got in a lot of hot water with my best friends father for saying, "I do not feel THAT bad for them." Mr. Cohen did not explain very well why his people did not put up a greater resistance. They let those Nazi bastards take everything from them why didn’t they fight back.
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Umm,

It was not really a matter of choice.

The Nazis had guns, jails, people, and the power of the state behind them.

Whereas the German Jewish community was small, had few weapons, no training in fighting their own military, little organization, and no real outside support to resist such overwhelming force.
 
Not to mention a refusal to acknowledge to themselves where the Third Reich was heading. Most humans hope to the very last moment that they'll live. Thus many complied with all of the repressions in order to not be killed on the spot. People were asked to dig their own graves and they did it.
 
Understand also, Nazism was a creeping phenomenon. Jews, in Germany, represented about 1 to 2% of the population. By 1933 when the Nazi's won power (even though they were a minority in the parliment, they were the power in the majority right-wing bloc), they quickly manuvered to make Hitler leader of a one party state. Discrimination was the rule of the day...and Hitler was popular...so the next step, the Nuremburg laws in 34/35 were presented as part of the Nazi plan for German salvation...and, again, its target was a very small number of people...agin 500,000 of a 40 million population. The racial laws didn't affect the vast majority of Germans, and with the subtle and less than subtle anti-semitism running throught the culture, it was positioned as pay-back.

What were the 500,000 jews to do? In some respects, many thought of themselves as German. Many thought that it would pass. Many had not encountered overt discrimination and violence agaisnt them...and they were a drop in a vast ocean. They were overwhelmed before they could effectively react (if they ever could).

With respect to other Jews, once the war started in 1939 -- the German blitzkrieg in the East just rolled over everything...these Jews didn't have much choice, they were rounded up at gun point, executed by action groups or sent to labor and death camps. And, it should never be forgotten that there were Jewish partisans in the Soviet sector who bravely fought the Germans and resisted...not to mention the resistence in places like Warsaw where, in 44, there was an impossible uprising. Impossible, because the Germans had all of the heavy equipment and leveled the place...it was a suicide mission for the resisters.

In the west, few believed that the Germans were capable of the kinds of murder policies that they implemented. Like the East, Western Europe was quickly over-run. Populations were caught in place, and quickly segregated out from the rest of society so that the brutal policy turned on them would be more or less invisible.





In short, it isn't
 
headscratcher4 said:
In the west, few believed that the Germans were capable of the kinds of murder policies that they implemented.
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It's similar to how 9/11 Truthers argue that the terrorists shouldn't have been able to take over planes with 'box cutters' because passengers should have fought back.

Hindsight is 20/20. They did not have all of the information that we currently do, so we are in no position to say what they 'should have' done.
 
Indeed...it is just as well to ask why tens of millions of Russians and Chinese allowed themselves to be murdered and starved to death with out a significant revolt.
 
There is a movie called "Ship of Fools" with an all-star cast. It's based on a novel by Katherine Anne Porter and takes place just before the Holocaust begins. The ship is German and there is a Jewish passenger who has the most chilling line in the whole film. When warned about going back to German because he is a Jew, he replies:

"What are they going to do? Kill all of us?"

Then chuckles.
 
The poster has apparantly never heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in which Jewish armed resistance held the Nazis at bay for four weeks. The entire country of France only lasted six.
 
Oppression like this goes piecemeal. You always let people think they have a chance while you weaken them. You don't knock on their doors saying "Hey, you are next on the train to the death camp!". One must realize that the situation was always made so that the individual could only resist at the cost if his/her life. Some did, but most people won't.

To be sure, if everybody had just started to run screaming and had to be gunned down, the whole operation would have become so bloody and dangerous that it would have ground to a halt, but most people don't have such courage. Especially not when half starved and driven close to total exhaustion.

Hans
 
headscratcher4 said:
...
And, it should never be forgotten that there were Jewish partisans in the Soviet sector who bravely fought the Germans and resisted...not to mention the resistence in places like Warsaw where, in 44, there was an impossible uprising. Impossible, because the Germans had all of the heavy equipment and leveled the place...it was a suicide mission for the resisters.
...
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Recommended reading:

Mila 18, by Leon Uris, about the Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto (expanded from a chapter in Exodus)

Treblinka, by Jean-Francois Steiner, about the Treblinka revolt
 
hgc said:
Recommended reading:

Mila 18, by Leon Uris, about the Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto (expanded from a chapter in Exodus)

Treblinka, by Jean-Francois Steiner, about the Treblinka revolt
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There was a fairly decent made-for-TV movie called Escape from Sobibor about the prisoners' revolt at the Sobibor death camp.
 
I remember that movie. At that time I wasn't very familiar with Jews or the details of the Holocaust, but it freaked me out so much I wrote about it in my diary.
 
Cleon said:
There was a fairly decent made-for-TV movie called Escape from Sobibor about the prisoners' revolt at the Sobibor death camp.
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Yes...and as I recall, only a handful of survivors made it...something like 88 of all of the camp inmates (does that sound right). Worse still, the Russians were very suspicious...even of their own POWs ...who wondered into the woods and encountered Soviet partisans. You couldn't win for surviving.
 
And, least we forget, there was the soundercomando revolt in Auschwitz in 1944, they even, I think, were able to put some of the gas chambers and crematoria out of action...of course, they were all killed -- and pretty much figured they would be.
 
headscratcher4 said:
Yes...and as I recall, only a handful of survivors made it...something like 88 of all of the camp inmates (does that sound right).
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There were about 600 prisoners, about half made it out of the camp. Surviving the war was a little more difficult, and IIRC only a few dozen made it. Some fell back into Nazi hands (easy to do in Poland), some were killed by bandits, and some were killed by Polish partizans who weren't any fonder of Jews than the Nazis.
 
headscratcher4 said:
And, least we forget, there was the soundercomando revolt in Auschwitz in 1944, they even, I think, were able to put some of the gas chambers and crematoria out of action...of course, they were all killed -- and pretty much figured they would be.
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Reading the stories of the (very few) surviving Sonderkommando workers is very, very unsettling.

The inhumanity of the work they were forced to do was such that death was a welcome release. :(
 
Thanks! It makes the case even stronger. And, again it emphasizes my main point. It started in Germany where Jews were a tiny percent of the population. They didn't know what hit them, nor did populations caught up in the Blitzkrieg...farming the fields or minding the store one day, being herded off to killing pits at machine gun point the next. There wasn't a Jewish army. There wasn't uniformity of Jewish communties from country to country. THere wasn't great communications between Jewish communities. There was German unity of purpose.
 
Ripley Twenty-Nine said:
It's similar to how 9/11 Truthers argue that the terrorists shouldn't have been able to take over planes with 'box cutters' because passengers should have fought back.

Hindsight is 20/20. They did not have all of the information that we currently do, so we are in no position to say what they 'should have' done.
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This seems exactly right to me.*

Cleon said:
There was a fairly decent made-for-TV movie called Escape from Sobibor about the prisoners' revolt at the Sobibor death camp.
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My understanding it that the reason that this was the one and only significant escape from the concentration camps might have been because after this the Nazis systematically underfed prisoners to keep them too weak to revolt.

As an aside, this thread reinforces a misrepresentation of the crimes of the Nazis. The Jews were far from the only targeted victims and by some measure didn't even make up a majority of the victims of the Nazis.

My rough understanding of the Nazi civilian murders:

Jews - 6 million
Other targeted groups - 2 million
Other civilian deaths - 5 million

Other targeted groups included disabled, Jehovah's witnesses, homosexuals, Roma, political prisoners

Other civilian deaths included about 3 million non-Jewish Poles

* ETA - Although in the case of the hijacked airplanes I think there were people in position to know about the possibility of suicide attacks against civilian airliners and they didn't do anything about it except to resist efforts to get reinforced doors installed on jetliners because of pressure from the airline industry that wanted to save money by not installing reinforced doors.
 
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